A Gift of Words

Rosalind Dando

Published by Shadow Spark Publishing, 2024.

While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

A GIFT OF WORDS

First edition. April 30, 2024.

Copyright © 2024 Rosalind Dando.

Written by Rosalind Dando.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Acknowledgements

About the Author

For Sally.I promised I'd keep on creating.

Chapter 1

Birthdays should be days of lie-ins and cake, of presents and TV, of board games and eating too much chocolate. There should be sunshine and beaches, or crisp autumn days in the park. There should be a rule, Cam McLoughlin thinks, that anyone of school age should automatically get their birthday off. Especially so if their birthday happens to land on a grey Monday in the middle of October.

Going to bed the night before his twelfth birthday comes with all the apprehension Cam expects, plus an extra helping of anxiety. Since starting at Highgrove Secondary at the beginning of September, he’s come to recognise the knot of worries which tangles itself up on a Sunday evening in preparation for Monday morning. Throwing a birthday into the mix adds other dimensions of concern: Will anyone remember? Does he want them to? Will his dad remember? This last one is unlikely, but the niggle of hope is there, waiting to be flattened by a tonne of remembered failures and let-downs.

And turning twelve is even worse than every birthday which has gone before it, for reasons Cam doesn’t even want to think about on a Sunday night. All he can do is close his eyes, listen to the mindfulness CD mum bought him a couple of years ago, and gradually drift into unsettled sleep and dreams.

––––––––

WHEN MORNING COMES around, the knot is still there in his stomach, just as it is every Monday. His alarm has gone off four times already, and now it’s just misbehaving. With its shrill beeping ringing in his ears, Cam pushes himself to sit and glares at the end of his bed, where his alarm clock dances up and down as if on an invisible string.

“I’m AWAKE!” Cam yells through the closed bedroom door as he reaches out to kick the clock with a bare foot. The evil machine skips back out of his reach and continues to beep at full volume.

“Then get up!” singsongs back his aunt, who sounds infuriatingly cheerful for this time of the morning.

Whoever thought Monday would be a good day for turning twelve? It’s grim. Wearing a scowl and pyjamas with trousers that are definitely too short—at least he’s grown a bit over the last few months; people might stop calling him ‘hobbit’ at school—Cam jumps out of bed, landing with a thud on the floor, and grabs the circling timepiece. He smacks the red button, and the infernal noise finally ceases. He’s sure the clock looks smug, if such a thing is possible.

He throws open his bedroom door to where his aunt stands, a large mug of coffee in her hand. Her long, dark curls are loose, and she’s wearing what he can only think of as a golden robe. There are purple symbols embroidered around the hem and fake fur on the collar. She beams at him, brown eyes twinkling with mischief. Frankie is one of those people who grins at everything, like she can see the hidden humour of the world. Cam, on the other hand, does not see the funny side of being woken by an insane alarm clock.

“That,” he says darkly, “was evil.”

She holds up her spare hand in mock surrender. “White magic. Well, maybe slightly grey. You were going to be late.”

Cam glances at his watch. “No, I wasn’t.”

“Not late for school, Cam. Late for... the other thing. You know. It’s your birthday.”

When he continues to look at her blankly, deliberately forgetful, his aunt shakes her head in disbelief. “Your twelfth birthday. The book?”

“Oh. That.” He squeezes past her on the narrow landing and heads for the bathroom, but she catches him by the shoulder.

“Yes. That. Your mum’s waiting for you downstairs.”

Cam squirms free. “Frankie, I’d love to. But I will be late for school if I don’t get ready. Maybe later, okay?” He ducks under her arm and dives for the bathroom, where he bolts the door behind him and relishes the sanctuary.

“She’ll be very upset,” Frankie says. From the sound of her voice, she’s leaning against the bathroom door.

“She’ll cope.”

As he reaches for the toothpaste, it levitates into the air above his head, just out of reach. Cam jumps and grabs for it, misses, and lands with a crash in the bath.

“WHAT’S GOING ON UP THERE?”

And that would be Mum, Cam thinks, as he lies sprawled with his legs in the air over the side of the bath. Brilliant. The tube of toothpaste does little circles over his head, like birds do in cartoons. He half expects it to start cheeping.

“My beloved nephew is getting ready,” Frankie calls back, then she lowers her voice so only Cam can hear her. “You okay in there?” The toothpaste drops into Cam’s lap, inanimate once more.

Cam mutters something under his breath, then scrambles to his feet and out of the bath. “I’m fine,” he growls, then sets about his morning routine, ignoring the familiar butterfly-ache in his stomach. Mondays are awful. Birthdays on Mondays are even worse.

––––––––

MUM’S WAITING FOR HIM downstairs, dressed in a curious knitted garment which could be a long cardigan, could be a dress, or could just be a tangle of wool which fell together and decided to stay that way. Her long, dark hair is tied up in a messy bun, and although she looks tired behind her glasses—she always looks tired these days—there’s a warmth and comfort around her that nothing can take away. She stands beside a small pile of presents. Cam notes with faint disappointment that there’s nothing even vaguely console-shaped in there. Beside them is a huge great book with a giant green bow tied around it. The book seems to have its own form of gravity, as it draws his attention like nothing else. Libris Sapientia. The Book of Wisdom. His own private curse.

“Morning, Mum,” Cam says, giving her a big hug and doing his best to ignore the book.

“Happy birthday, sweetheart.” Mum hugs him back and, for a brief moment, everything feels normal and okay. She smells of fresh mint and reassurance. “I can’t believe my little boy is all grown up. Twelve years!”

“Twelve years and I’ve never been fed,” Cam says, although he’s smiling. “Can’t a birthday boy have some breakfast?”

“On it!” Frankie calls back from the kitchen. Cam peers past his mother to see what appears to be half the contents of their kitchen flying around in mid-air.

“I don’t want to know, do I?” sighs Mum.

One of the pieces of special china, reserved only for celebrations, narrowly dodges the toaster, which twirls enthusiastically by itself at the end of its electrical tether like a kite on a string. As Cam watches, two pieces of toast are flung out and land on waiting plates. How the kitchen isn’t on fire yet, he will never know. Frankie stands on one foot in the middle of it all, beaming and waving her hands around as if she’s conducting an orchestra. She spots Cam and winks outrageously.

Cam ducks back behind Mum. “Nope.”

She sighs again and ruffles his hair—it was a lost cause this morning anyway, like always. A chaotic disarray of dark curls, like Frankie’s, which were cute when he was a little kid. According to his mum and aunt, anyway. These days, not so much.

“Anything from Dad?” He hears the hope in his voice and hates himself a little bit for it. It’s been seven years; time to get over it and move on. Dad clearly has.

Mum gives him an affectionate smile, but he can see the look in her eyes and knows her answer before she opens her mouth to speak. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh.” It’s hard to hide his disappointment, although he does try for her sake. “It’s okay.”

“Birthday breakfast!” carols Frankie, dancing into the dining room with three plates sashaying along behind her. “Birthday boy! Birthday mum! Birthday cook!” As she announces the names, the plates all twirl off to their rightful owners, and Cam catches his before he winds up with scrambled eggs all over his green school jumper. Two sheets of toast cut into triangles, covered with a pile of eggs and topped with fried tomatoes. Just how he likes it. And on the special china, too. Mum must be in a good mood if they’re using the inheritance plates for breakfast.

Cam inhales his breakfast and resists the urge to lick up the crumbs. Frankie might be bonkers, but she is a brilliant cook. He’s barely finished when the plate is whisked away and a present is dumped into his lap.

“No,” Mum says, taking it away before he even has a chance to read the label. “The book comes first.”

Cam glances at the clock and his heart lurches. “Later. It can all wait until after school.” He can’t be late, not on his birthday.

“But—” Mum begins, her fingers resting lightly on the leather cover of her precious book.

“Sorry, Mum. Gotta go.” He grabs his bag and slips on his shoes. “See you later.” He gives her a quick hug goodbye. “Thanks for the lovely breakfast, Frankie.”

His aunt curtseys and grins. “Anything for my darling nephew.”

“Don’t forget your coat,” Mum says.

“I’m fine.”

“Even fine people need coats,” Mum points out. His navy jacket picks itself off the coat rack and hovers expectantly in front of him.

Cam sighs, shaking his head, and ducks under the floating outerwear. He makes it out into the chilly autumn morning before either Mum or Frankie—or his coat—can stop him.

Chapter 2

Alice is waiting by the old railway bridge, wearing black jeans, a black hoodie, scarlet Doc Martens, and a scowl. Her red hair is tied in a messy ponytail, which does absolutely nothing to hide its forest-green tips, and she’s got purple eyeliner inexpertly applied around her emerald eyes. There’s absolutely zero chance of her getting away with that outfit at school, and she knows it. She also doesn’t care in the slightest. Cam would kill to be as chilled as Alice when it came to other people’s opinions.

“We’re going to be late,” she says, by way of greeting. “Happy birthday. Why do you have plants sticking out of your bag?”

Cam swings his rucksack around so he can investigate while they walk. There are indeed plants hanging out of one of the side pockets. “It’s rosemary,” he says, after a moment of figuring them out. “And spearmint.”

She laughs. “Witch stuff?”

“Yup.” Cam shoves the wilting foliage into his bag, where it will no doubt make his books smell weird, because what he really needs is yet another thing to make him stand out. But he can’t quite bear to throw it out onto the path, because he knows what it can do for him, and he needs all the help he can get. Rosemary for protection, removing anxiety, and keeping him safe. Spearmint for luck—and the universe knows he doesn’t have enough of that.

Alice is the only one who knows Cam’s secret. Fortunately, she thinks it’s cool. She marches along West Street, and Cam has to work hard to keep pace with her. Alice inherited long legs from her mother; he inherited witchcraft from his. It’s not fair.

“Did you write your name in the book yet?” Her question comes out of the blue.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because.” He shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t want to have a gift. It’s hard enough trying to pretend to be normal as it is.”

She sticks out her tongue. “You’re insane. Everyone wants to be able to do magic.”

“I don’t.”

Alice glares at him. “You’re just weird,” she retorts. “You could get a power that, I don’t know, means you can suddenly sing in tune. You could be in my band, when I learn to play the guitar.”

Alice doesn’t have a band yet—or a guitar, for that matter—but Cam is convinced she’ll have both one day, if that’s what she desires. She’s one of those people who blaze their trail through life and achieve, regardless of what other plans the world might have. She’ll get whatever she wants. But even if the book turns him into Freddie Mercury, there’s no way he’d get up and sing in front of anyone. Ever. The mere thought of it turns his stomach to liquid panic.

“Knowing my luck, I’ll be able to control slugs,” Cam grumbles, trying not to think about standing in front of a crowd of people.

“Summon weasels.”

“Speak in fluent gibberish.”

She elbows him. “You do that anyway.”

“Do not.”

Alice cackles like the witch she isn’t. “Your family is wasted on you,” she says. “If I got to write my name in that book on my birthday, I’d be up at one minute past midnight, biro in hand, ready and waiting for whatever it would give me.”

Cam kicks a pinecone out of his path and into the middle of the road. “Be my guest. You’d probably be able to fly or turn invisible or something.”

“Nah, I want your aunt’s power. That’s awesome. Although your mum’s is pretty cool. It’d certainly make getting to school quicker. What’s the fancy name for it again?”

“Shadow-Shifter.” Cam stares at the ground and tries to convince his legs to move faster. Alice certainly has a point; being able to travel through shadowed places would be rather handy, especially when he’s running late. Again.

Alice glances at her phone and makes a face. “Come on, we’d better run.”

––––––––

DESPITE A DESPERATE sprint up the final road to Highgrove Secondary, they’re five minutes late and have to sign in at the main reception. Mrs Kendall, the receptionist, gives Alice a look of disapproval but says nothing about her hair and attire.

Their form teacher, Mr Barker, is not as restrained. “What do you call that outfit?” he demands, as Cam and Alice sidle into their form room. Well, Cam sidles—trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. Alice strides.

She glowers at Mr Barker and shrugs. “Clothes,” she says.

Mr Barker is immune to her glare. “Where’s your uniform, Alice?”

Alice drops into her seat and gives another ‘well-I-don’t-care’ shrug.

“Not good enough. Stay behind after the register. And you, Cameron.” Mr Barker turns his sour gaze to Cam, who shrinks into his chair and tries to think invisible thoughts. “Do you think it’s acceptable to be late?”

Cam shakes his head and stares at his desk. Someone’s carved ‘Cam-moron’ on it and inked over the letters with black pen. Enthusiastically. Repeatedly.

“I asked you a question, Cameron.”

Cam risks lifting his eyes and meets the steady glare of his teacher. “No, Mr Barker. Sorry. I’ll do better.”

Frowning, Mr Barker turns back to the paperwork on his desk. “As you know, we have a class trip to the Science & Media Museum on Friday. I haven’t had permission slips back from... Fraser, Cassie—yes, Fraser, you did have a letter, everyone had letters—and you, Cameron.”

Somebody behind him sniggers. “His freak family probably don’t believe in science, Sir.”

Mr Barker turns his steel-eyed glare to the speaker. “That’s quite enough of that, Danny. Cameron, do you think you could manage to grace my desk with a slip tomorrow morning?”

Cam is painfully aware of his face turning a colour to match Alice’s boots. “Yes, Mr Barker,” he mumbles.

The bell rings, and everyone picks up their stuff and shuffles towards the door, heading to Geography. At least three people ‘accidentally’ shove Cam from behind, although Brynn gives him a shy smile and lets him go past.

“Happy birthday, weirdo,” someone mutters.

Cam wishes he’d stayed in bed.

––––––––

MONDAY DOES NOT IMPROVE. At half past three, when the final bell rings and Highgrove spills hundreds of teenagers out onto the streets, Cam sits in his chair in the art classroom and tries to blend in with his surroundings. Next to him, Alice is digging a pointed black pencil beneath the tips of her nails and trying to colour them in from underneath. At some point during the day, her long hair has come out of its restraints and is now a waterfall of ginger and green over her shoulders.

“It’s not good enough, you two,” his art teacher, Mrs Wallsey, is saying, in her best I-Do-Care-About-My-Students voice. “You’re here to learn; you have plenty of time for conversation after school. I’m really glad you’re friends, and it’s lovely to see you two together, but this classroom isn’t the place for all that chat. Do you understand?”

Cam nods, and tries his best to look contrite. Alice ignores Mrs Wallsey and continues colouring her nails.

“Sorry, Mrs Wallsey. I’ll try to do better.”

She smiles. “I know you will, Cam. You’re a good kid. It’s your birthday today, I think?”

He nods again.

The teacher’s smile widens. “Happy birthday, Cam. Anything nice planned for this evening?”

Alice perks up. “He’s got a book, Mrs Wallsey. A special book.”

Cam aims a kick at Alice under the table and glares at her.

“Oh, how lovely! I’m a great reader, too. Well, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.” She gestures towards the classroom door. “Go on, the pair of you. And don’t forget to finish your project for next week.”

Cam hoists his bag over his shoulder, feeling the weight of Monday’s homework tugging him down, and gets out of the classroom before Mrs Wallsey can change her mind and ask any questions about this special book of his.

Once they’re outside, Alice collapses in a howl of laughter. “Oh, how lovely!” she says, mimicking the art teacher’s posh intonations perfectly.

“Stop it.” Cam starts walking.

Alice skips to keep pace with him. “Can I watch you write your name?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No.”

She pouts and puts a hand on her hip. “Are you sulking?”

“No.” He can’t help it; a small twitch of a smile catches at the corner of his mouth. She’s just too... Alice.

Flinging an arm around his shoulders, Alice beams at him. “You are sulking. Sulkypants McLoughlin. Sulky McSulkface.”

“You really want to see me write my name in the book?”

She grins like Frankie. “Yes!”

“Fine. If it’ll get you off my back—aaargh!” This last is because, as he is talking, Alice launches herself into an unplanned piggyback. The combination of her being half a head taller than he is, plus their heavy rucksacks, leads to both of them ending up in one of the bushes lining the edge of the main path across the school campus.

Cam pulls leaves out of his curly hair and sighs. “I’m going to pretend that didn’t happen.”

Alice, lying on her back in the wrecked hedge, her books strewn across the path, is too busy laughing to reply.

Chapter 3

To Cam’s great surprise, Frankie is waiting in her sunshine-yellow VW Beetle outside school. Thankfully, she’s changed out of the golden robe and into jeans and a bright turquoise sweater. She eyes the remains of the bush decorating his hair and clothes, raises her eyebrows, and chuckles.

“Revenge of the Killer Hedge from Outer Space?”

“Revenge of Alice, more like,” Cam says, leaning in through the open passenger side window. “Can we give the Terror a ride as well?”

Frankie jerks a thumb at the tiny back seats. “If she can fit.”

Alice is made of legs and arms, but she folds herself into the narrow space with her bag on her lap. Cam flings himself into the passenger seat and slams the door.

“Go, go, go!” he yells, fastening his seatbelt.

“It’s not a getaway vehicle,” Frankie says as the elderly car coughs and growls into life, but she drives it as if they’re being chased by the police all the way home. All three of them are crying tears of laughter by the time the Beetle lurches onto the driveway, and Mum gives them a strange look as they come in.

“Do I need to ask?”

Frankie grins. “Definitely, absolutely, unequivocally, no.”

Mum sighs. “Never mind. Hi, Alice.”

Alice waves, and bits of hedge fall onto the carpet at her feet. “Hi, Miss McLoughlin. Do you have the book ready for Cam?”

Cam nudges her with his elbow, but she ignores him. Mum, on the other hand, brightens.

“We do—come on, it’s through here.”

The book is in pride of place on the coffee table, adorned with its green bow and drawing all attention towards it like some sort of leather-bound black hole.

“Can’t I open the cards and presents first?” Cam asks, dumping his bag and kicking off his shoes.

“Bor-ing,” Alice moans, throwing herself onto the purple sofa and rolling her eyes. “Book first!”

Cam feels like all he does is glare at his best friend these days, but then she’s not the one whose future lies in writing three simple words: Cameron Darius McLoughlin. Twenty-three letters and his fate is sealed. The longer he puts off entering his name in the book, the longer his future stays wide open. He could be anyone; he could become anything.

Glancing at her watch, Mum nods. “We’ve got seven and a half hours until midnight. There’s no rush. Although,” she adds, giving Cam a stern look, “don’t think you’re going to bed at midnight. You’ve still got school tomorrow.”

As if he could forget.

In the end, he allows himself to open the presents and cards first, as a reward for surviving the day so far. Mum has knitted him a jumper in rusty oranges and reds, which he immediately swaps for his bottle-green school top. Three bind runes, embroidered in a rich, deep purple silk thread, are inside the left cuff:

“PROTECTION,” MUM SAYS, pointing to the one on the left, “good luck, and courage.”

All three of those are things he could do with, thinks Cam, running his fingers over the smooth silken lines. He wonders if there’s a bind rune for popularity, although he’d settle for not being picked on daily.

There’s an MP3 player from Frankie, along with a set of over-ear headphones, and a wooden clock kit from his grandparents on Mum’s side. Somehow, Alice has managed to sneak a parcel in, which turns out to be a t-shirt for his favourite band, Comets Collide.

And then, the presents are opened. The cards are on the mantelpiece. They’ve all had a slice of the carrot cake Frankie made, which tastes of honey and fresh raspberries with acres of creamy cheese frosting. Alice ate two slices and declared she might now explode.

Only the book remains, and Cam can’t put it off any longer because everyone’s watching him expectantly.

“Do I need... I dunno, a special pen or something?” He eyes the tome warily. “It feels like I ought to be writing my name in blood. Or at least with, like, a quill. One of those big, feathery things, like they had in olden days.”

Mum hands him a silver pen with a smile. “No blood needed, love. This will do fine.”

Cam swallows. “So... I open the book. Where do I write?”

“It’ll show you.” Frankie pushes the Libris Sapientia towards him. “Go on, Cam. It’ll be wonderful.”

Nervous, he slowly undoes the showy green bow and sets the ribbon to one side. That’ll be Frankie’s contribution. The front cover of the book is brown leather, embossed with a swirling border which reminds him of the ocean. In the centre is a pentagram—a five-pointed star—set within a circle. Each point represents a natural element, part of the magic he will control once he’s written his name on a page within. Earth, fire, water, air, and spirit.

He lifts the front cover to see the intricate title page. Breathes in. Breathes out. He can do this. How hard can it be to write his name?

The pages stir as if caught in an unseen wind and flutter open to a page filled with names. Names he recognises; now he looks at them. There’s Frankie (Francesca Sophie McLoughlin), and Mum (Rowan Alyssa McLoughlin). Above them, their parents (Douglas Reginald McLoughlin and Elizabeth May Harrow). And before those names are a dozen more, each written in unfamiliar handwriting. Great-grandparents he’s never met, and great-great-grandparents, dead long before he was born. Generations of witches, and he can feel them all watching him.

Cam looks up from the book to find Mum, Frankie, and Alice all standing, watching him. Mum nods reassuringly. “Just write your name. Your full name. The book will do the rest.”

He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Then, before he can second-guess himself again, Cam opens his eyes and writes his name in black ink as neatly as he can.

Cameron Darius McLoughlin

That’s it.

He’s done it. He’s added his name to the legacy and now he gets his gift. Except, nothing seems to have changed.

“Well?” Alice looks at him, wide-eyed and expectant. “Can you feel it?”

Cam puts the pen down. “No.”

Frankie gives him a hopeful smile. “Sometimes it takes a minute. I know it took me a while.”

“How do you find out what it is?”

Mum purses her lips. “You just... know. You can’t feel any changes? Sense anything... inside you?”

Cam’s cheeks begin to burn with embarrassment. He’s done what they wanted; it hasn’t worked. Can’t they leave it alone?

“Maybe the book wasn’t ready,” Alice offers. “Maybe it wasn’t the right time. This is his twelfth birthday, isn’t it? He wasn’t, maybe born after midnight or something? Does the book even work if you write your name in it on the wrong day, anyway?” She reaches out to touch it and Cam shuts the book with a bang. The birthday cake sits like a lump of concrete in his stomach, and he thinks he might be sick.

“Just... leave it, okay?” he snaps. “It didn’t work. It didn’t work because I fail at everything. And it wasn’t enough for the universe to make my birthday suck, it had to screw up the one thing I was supposed to get right today as well. So, forget it. I’m going to do my homework so at least I won’t be in as much trouble tomorrow.”

With that, he snatches his bag from the floor and stomps upstairs. He slams his door—something he’s not entirely proud of, but it helps his temper a fraction—and hurls the bag of books to the bed where they cascade out in a slithering heap. The herbs from this morning are withered and brown, squashed flat during the day.

He’s failed at something he shouldn’t be able to fail at. Even the book considers him a loser, someone who doesn’t deserve the gift he’s been told for years will be his on his twelfth birthday. When even an inanimate object agrees with the opinions of the kids at school, you know you’ve really hit rock bottom.

Cam growls something Mum would be disappointed to hear, grabs his maths book out of the unruly pile, and makes a start on his homework. Simplifying equations is a whole lot easier than simplifying his crazy life.

Chapter 4

Tuesday morning finds Cam wide awake and staring at the ceiling of his bedroom, trying to figure out if he feels any different. Maybe it—whatever it might be—kicked in after midnight. Maybe, despite what Mum and Frankie thought, it didn’t happen immediately. They’re both old, anyway, so they’ve probably forgotten what it was like being twelve, let alone when they got their powers. Maybe they signed the book just before midnight or something. Maybe, maybe, maybe...

It’s not going to happen. He needs to stop kidding himself that somehow, overnight, he has transformed from a nerdy hobbit into... what does he expect? Merlin? His life doesn’t work that way. The book was never going to change him into someone else. He simply has to keep pretending it’s all okay and keep being his own boring, weirdo self.

Downstairs, Frankie hands him breakfast with a sympathetic smile. “Anything this morning?”

“No.” Don’t pity me, he thinks. Please, don’t pity me.

“We’ll figure it out, Cam,” she says. “Me and your mum, we’ll figure it out. You’ll be fine. Trust me.”

He manages to smile weakly back at her, the expression feeling like a lie. “Thanks.”

The toast tastes like cardboard, but he forces it down so as not to upset her.

“It’ll be okay,” Frankie says, and he clearly must look like an abandoned puppy or something because she gives him a massive hug. “I promise. We’ll get this sorted. You’ll be slinging spells with the best of them in no time at all.”

He hugs her back, despite the aching pit in his stomach which hasn’t gone away since the previous evening. Perhaps the cake-concrete has set and glued itself to his stomach, and now he’ll always have a solid lump there. He’ll die, and they’ll find a fossilised piece of his twelfth birthday cake wedged somewhere between his spleen and liver.

––––––––

“I’M SORRY YOUR BIRTHDAY was rubbish.” Alice sits on the high brick wall next to the railway bridge, kicking her heels against the graffiti. She jumps down easily and Cam’s ankles twinge in silent sympathy. “D’you want to, I dunno, talk about it?”

Cam shrugs. “Nothing to talk about. It didn’t work. Did you do the maths?”

She laughs. “Don’t be stupid. But you did, so I can copy off you at break, right?”

He frowns and she laughs more.

“Come on, you can copy my French if you want.”

Alice’s brother, Theo, does French in year ten, and helps with her French homework in exchange for her keeping silent when he goes to stay with a friend. Not that their mum appears to mind or notice either way, and Theo seems to spend more time away from home than there, these days. He has his own problems, and Cam wouldn’t even know where to begin. Although Alice loves him, Theo is someone Cam is ever-so-slightly afraid of, for reasons he can’t quite explain. And he’d never let Alice know that he’s scared of her brother.

The conversation switches to a different topic, for which Cam is grateful. The sooner he can put this whole miserable experience behind him and carry on with life as normal—no matter how tough it can be—the better.

He’s forgotten that blasted approval slip again, though, and Mr Barker is massively unimpressed.

“You’re twelve years old now, Cam. You shouldn’t need your grown-ups to organise this sort of thing for you, should you?”

Cam stares at his shoes. If Mr Barker and Highgrove Secondary could drag themselves into the twenty-first century and use an online system instead, that would be super useful. But no, they’re stuck in the pre-internet Dark Ages, and everything’s on paper when it comes to parental permission for trips.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Danny whispering to one of his mates. Somebody sniggers and glances over at Brynn. Cam winces internally, his thoughts already drifting away from the teacher’s voice. Danny and the rest of his mates are awful to Brynn—constantly finding new ways to bully and upset them. Anyone who makes the mistake of standing out is fair game, at least as far as that crowd are concerned, and being non-binary is like Brynn has a huge neon sign above their head saying, ‘pick on me!’. Secretly, Cam is impressed and proud of Brynn, but he’s never said as much out loud. One day, maybe he will, when he’s feeling brave enough to talk to someone new.

Mr Barker sighs, drawing Cam back to the conversation. “I’ll give your mum a call later to remind her. If I don’t get approval, you can’t come with us.”

A sudden thought strikes Cam. Maybe he could spend the day in the library instead, away from everyone else.

It’s like his teacher can read his mind. “If you don’t come with us, you’ll have to go into 8SP for the day.”

8SP—Miss Parkinson’s form—is Danny’s older brother’s class. Cam sneaks a glance over in time to see Danny making a rude gesture at him. Spending a day with year eight does not sound like a good alternative.

“I’ll get it sorted, Sir,” Cam promises, making a mental note to get the slip signed after school. Danny is trouble, but his brother is worse.

“See that you do.”

The bell rings for first period and Alice takes herself off to the school counsellor, where she has to try and explain why she’s so angry at the world. Given some of the things she’s mentioned in confidence to Cam, it’s not hard to see why at times. The whole week, at the end of year five, where it was just her and her brother trying to look after themselves. That time her dad came home, and Alice locked herself in the bathroom for a whole night. Cam wonders briefly what Mrs Winters would say to him if she knew what his life was like, although it’s nowhere near as bad as Alice’s.

For everyone else, including Cam, it’s a race to see who can be last into the English classroom where Mr Harris waits. Cam winds up by himself at the end of a row, between an empty seat and Ayana Bakri, who turns her chair away from him, the better to chat with Lucy Gibbons. To make matters worse, Danny is sitting right in front of him, leaning his chair back and thumping it against Cam’s table so Cam’s writing wobbles.

Could Tuesday get any worse than Monday? Cam wouldn’t want to place any bets right now; he’s clearly angered a minor deity somewhere along the line. He tries to shuffle his chair and table back a few inches, but Danny turns and sneers at him. It’s easier to accept his work will be a mess this morning, so he shoves the table back to its original place. A couple of rows away, Brynn is watching Cam with sympathy. The non-binary kid pushes back shaggy mid-brown hair and gives Cam a small smile, but Cam is too worried about what Danny might do next to give it much thought.

“Cameron, when you’ve finished rearranging my classroom, do you think you could remind us about what we’ve been looking at?”

Cam jerks his gaze up to Mr Harris, who is watching him through thick glasses. “Err... what?”

Several people snigger.

Mr Harris represses a sigh. “What did we start looking at yesterday?”

“Oh! Beowulf.”

“Yes, good. Beowulf, an Anglo-Saxon epic poem. While the story itself is inherently Christian, despite its pagan origins, and shows this through its various morals, it’s important to remember...”

Cam zones out and doodles bind runes on the corner of his page.

Mr Harris continues to witter at the front of the class, trying to sound enthusiastic and excited by the subject matter, which he must have been teaching since it came out in its original form. “Who can tell me something about the Norse gods?”

Silence reigns across the classroom.

Mr Harris sits on his desk and tries a different approach. “Can anyone name any of the Norse gods?”

Brynn’s tentative hand rises. “Thor?”

Mr Harris beams as if he’s been given a pile of lost Shakespeare plays or whatever makes English teachers happy. “Excellent! Any others?”

“Odin?”

“Yes!”

“Loki.”

“Great!”

“Iron Man?”

Laughter erupts around the room.

“Marvel has a lot to answer for. No, Iron Man was not a Norse god.”

Cam doesn’t put his hand up, although he can name at least another five of the Norse gods without blinking. Frigga, Heimdall, Balder, Hod, and Bragi, he scribbles in the corner of his page, next to his doodled bind runes. If he thinks about it, there are more he could name. But the one he really enjoys reading about is Loki, Norse god of mischief. Trickster god. Underneath the runes, Cam writes,

I wish Loki came to this school.

Then he crosses it out and tries to pretend to listen to what Mr Harris is waffling on about now.

Five minutes later, the door to the classroom opens and Mrs Kendall steps through, followed by a student. The new boy has angelic golden curls and the sort of expression Cam recognises as one which will get anyone in the nearby vicinity into immediate and serious trouble. It’s a look of mischievous amusement at the world in general, and when his eyes catch sight of Cam, he grins wide enough for Cam to suspect there are sharks in his ancestry.

“This is Loman Lykill,” the receptionist says. “He’ll be joining your class from today.” She sounds a little confused but stands to one side to let the boy come past.

“Come in, come in, find a seat. We’re looking at Beowulf,” explains Mr Harris, waving vaguely towards the rest of the classroom. “Do you know it?”

Loman turns a stellar smile to the teacher. “Of course,” he says brightly. “Original text or Seamus Heaney?”

Someone coughs at the back of the room. “Nerd!”

The new kid’s sharp eyes flick immediately to the interruption, as if he’s storing information away for later, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he catches sight of the empty seat next to Cam and walks towards it.

Cam’s not entirely sure what happens next, but Danny clearly sticks his foot out to try and trip Loman as he comes past. That’s not what happens, though. Somehow, Danny’s foot gets caught on the table leg, the new boy does a nimble hop over the flailing limb, and Danny winds up falling off his chair, much to the amusement of the rest of the class. Red-faced and accompanied by mocking laughter from his audience, Danny scrambles back into his seat and glares daggers at Loman—and Cam by sheer association.

“That was entertaining,” Loman stage-whispers to Cam as he sits down. “Is it always this much fun in your class?”

Cam, who is trying his best to become one with his chair, shakes his head and refuses to speak. If he ignores the boy sitting next to him, maybe he’ll go away. Or at least never speak to him again.

“Pity.” Loman drags the copy of Beowulf across the desk so it’s between them. “Might have to do something about that, then. We can’t have everyone dying of boredom.” He glances at Cam’s notebook and his doodled runes and list of Norse gods. A sly smile tugs at the corner of his lips. “Although, I don’t think you’re boring, Cam. Not in the slightest.”

Chapter 5

Cam stares at the boy for an eternity. “How do you know my name?” he eventually whispers.

Loman’s smile stretches into another broad grin and his bright blue eyes glitter with amusement. “It’s on your book.”

A quick glance at his English book confirms that, yes, his name is indeed written there.

“Oh.” Heat flushes in Cam’s cheeks and he stares resolutely at the open textbook, pretending to be engrossed in whatever Mr Harris is wittering about. He’s been in the same room as Loman for all of a minute, and the new kid must think he’s an utter idiot.

Beside him, Loman is diligently folding a piece of paper into something that looks like a flat diamond. When he’s finished, he takes another piece of paper and does the same again, barely watching his hands and nodding along with the teacher at appropriate moments.

Cam can’t help himself. “What are you making?” he whispers.

“Shuriken,” Loman answers. “Japanese throwing star.” He demonstrates how the paper diamonds slot into each other, making two points on a four-pointed star. “It should be metal, really,” he adds, folding a third piece. “But I’m rather limited here.”

Fascinated, Cam watches Loman as his fingers fold and crease until a completed star sits on his desk.

“Here,” Loman pushes it towards Cam. “You look like you might need it more than me.” He jerks his head forward, indicating the back of Danny’s head. “In case of emergencies.”

Cam doesn’t have the heart to tell Loman a paper star isn’t going to go very far when it comes to Danny, but it’s also the nicest thing anyone who’s not Alice has done for him at school since he was maybe eight years old. So he takes the star with a weak smile and tucks it inside the front pocket of his bag.

After half a lifetime, English is finally over and Loman shoves his books into his bag, which is covered in Sharpie doodles and Tippex graffiti. He swings the bag over his shoulder and looks at Cam.

“Where now?”

Cam was really hoping he wouldn’t ask that. He’d been praying that, at the end of the lesson, Loman would realise he was a dull nobody and latch onto someone more worthy of attention. But Adam, Jack and the rest of the football bros are jostling out of the classroom door, and the room is getting increasingly empty.

Loman raises a single eyebrow and glances at the door. “Or do we have a second sitting of English? ‘Cause I could go for that...”

“No. Um.” Cam wracks his brain for what happens in second period on a Tuesday. “Music. It’s... um... this way.”

He trails after the last handful of his class, past the waiting year elevens, who are all at least six feet tall and make him feel like even more of a hobbit than usual. He spots Theo, Alice’s older brother, loitering at the entrance to the building with a couple of other year tens, but isn’t brave enough to smile without Alice present.

“So, year eleven wear black?” Loman asks as they round a corner.

“Yeah. Green for the rest of us mortals, black for them.” Cam picks up the pace. They’re going to be last into music, which means they’ll be at the front where Mrs Havinter will be able to see them. She’ll get him to volunteer. At least he’ll have Alice back, though. Assuming she hasn’t made any comments that upset the counsellor. Again.

Alice is waiting in one of the back rows of the music classroom, sitting sideways with her red boots resting on the chair next to her, and glaring murder at anyone who dares to suggest she considers moving. Her expression brightens into a grin as she notices Cam, then turns confused at the sight of Loman.

“Who’s he?” she asks, sliding her feet off the chair, which Cam immediately plonks himself onto.

“New kid. Loman.”

Alice and Loman exchange a look and seem to come to some sort of understanding, because he drops his bag next to Cam, marches to the front of the class, and picks up an empty chair. With the teacher and rest of the class watching in bemused silence, he carries it back to where Cam and Alice are sitting, places it next to Cam, and sits.

Mrs Havinter sighs in weary defeat and gets on with starting the lesson.

Grateful for his back-row seat, Cam ignores her and turns to Alice. Keeping his voice quiet, he asks, “How’d it go?”

Alice shrugs. “No different. She was pleased I hadn’t hit anyone in the last week, though. I think I’m growing as a person.” She gives him a smile but it’s a bit thin, stretched at the edges, and he doesn’t want to push any further. Alice has plenty of things going on, and she tells him stuff when she needs to.

“So, you’re going to work in groups of three or four,” Mrs Havinter says, “to compose and perform a piece of music in front of the class, considering all the areas we’ve been looking at. You’ll have this lesson and half of the next to work on these, then we’ll perform at the end of the next session. Remember, your voice can also be an instrument.” She beams at them all encouragingly. “I know we have some wonderful singers in this class. Don’t be afraid to show it.”

The solid lump of fossilised cake is trying to pull Cam down into the earth. He’s vaguely aware of someone on the other side of the class asking a question, although he doesn’t hear the words.

“Yes, everyone will perform. It’s why you’re here. This is a safe place, and I’ll be looking for a brilliant audience as well as great performances.”

The cake-lump is like lead; Cam thinks he might be sick.

Someone else asks a question.

“You’re old enough to put yourselves into groups; you don’t need me to do that for you, do you?”

Derisive laughter answers before the class descends into a gentle form of chaos as friends and enemies shuffle themselves around into a more acceptable order. Cam, Alice and Loman hang back from the crowd.

“Working in a three, then?” Loman asks.

“Guess so,” Cam replies, briefly glancing across the room to where Brynn is engaged in quiet conversation with Lily and Imogen. He might have asked them, if they weren’t talking to the girls. Alice is too busy ripping a hole in the cuff of her sweater to respond.

Loman grins. “Either of you even remotely musical?”

Cam shakes his head. He’d rather clean all the toilets in school than be forced to stand up and participate. Alice, on the other hand, perks up. “I want to play guitar,” she says.

“Excellent!” Loman goes off to speak to Mrs Havinter, and Cam and Alice exchange A Look.

“Where’d you find this kid?” Alice asks. “He’s even weirder than you, and that’s saying something.”

“He just... sat next to me. In English. And now he’s here. Um.”

Loman bounces back, holding a battered acoustic guitar. It’s the same guitar that’s been in school for the last three decades, and Cam is 99% sure the last time it was used for actual music was never. Loman, on the other hand, holds it as if it’s a Fender Strat and runs a finger reverently over its tuneless strings. He sighs, tutting quietly to himself, and sets to work.

Standing with a foot on his seat, the guitar cradled over his raised knee, Loman twists and corrects the tuning pegs. Occasionally, he plucks a string with his head tilted to one side, and after a while, he begins to smile at the sounds coming from the instrument.

“How do you know how to do... whatever you’re doing?” Cam can’t help asking.

Adjusting the sixth and final string, Loman doesn’t look away from the guitar. “I learnt a while ago,” he says. “From my... cousin. There!” He strums the guitar and, for probably the first time in its life, it doesn’t sound like an animal being tortured.

“Here,” he says, holding it out to Alice. “For you.”

Alice looks at him as if he’s trying to hand her a poisonous snake. “Erm...” she says, and it’s one of the few times Cam’s ever seen her lost for words.

“You said you play,” Loman urges. “I found you a guitar.”

Alice blinks. “Electric,” she manages to say. “I... I want to play an electric. Not an acoustic. Why don’t you play it?”

He shrugs and settles the elderly guitar over his knee, then closes his eyes.

Somehow, all of this has earned them a small audience—mostly kids who are more interested in what someone else is doing instead of what they should be doing—so when Loman begins to play, people actually notice.

And he can play.

Cam doesn’t recognise the music, but he recognises the skill. Loman’s fingers shift over the strings, gently plucking out harmonies and a slow tune. And then he pauses for a beat. Everyone listening glances at each other as if unsure if the music has stopped. Loman opens his eyes and winks at Cam and Alice, and then his fingers begin to dance, making notes appear faster than Cam could have thought possible. It sounds as if at least three people are playing. The music builds, and now everyone—including Mrs Havinter—is listening to Loman’s performance. He finishes with a flourish, lifts the guitar and bows low to his impromptu audience.

“Ta-dah!” he says, flashing his brilliant grin at them all. The class erupts into a round of applause and Mrs Havinter looks as if she’s about to burst into tears.

“Amazing!” she gushes. “That was outstanding! Beautiful!”

Cam can’t help but agree. Although now he’s wondering if there’s anything Loman can’t do.

Chapter 6

“You think you’re something special, huh?” Danny pushes Loman back against the wall outside the music block. “Well, you’re not. You’re another weird freak like the hobbit and the ginger psycho.” He gives Loman’s shoulder another hard shove, just to make his point clearer.

Cam hovers nearby. He doesn’t want to see his new friend getting hurt—and he supposes Loman is a sort-of-friend, now—but there’s no way he’s brave enough to confront Danny. Alice, meanwhile, spits swearwords and launches herself at Danny like a feral cat. Jack grabs her and holds her back, where she snarls and kicks him in the shins repeatedly until he lets go. Alice’s boots are solid as steel. She looks ready to hurl herself back into the fray, but Loman doesn’t seem even slightly bothered by Danny’s unwanted attention. He raises his hands.

“Oh no,” he says, sarcasm lacing his words. “Oh no. Someone, please help me.”

Danny’s face goes the colour of beetroots, and his eyes narrow. “Shut up,” he hisses.

Loman only laughs. He’s still laughing when Mr Barker comes around the corner of the English block and spots them.

“Danny Williams! What’s going on?” Mr Barker looks ready to grab both of them by the back of their jumpers and haul them off in front of the head.

Danny drops Loman like he’s been electrocuted and turns to face their teacher. “Just having a chat, sir,” he says, brushing his hands off on his jumper. “Loman here needed some directions. Him being new and all.”

“And you saw fit to give those directions whilst holding him against a wall?”

Danny shrugs and saunters off, followed by two of his mates, leaving Cam, Loman, and Alice alone with Mr Barker. The teacher smiles at them and vanishes into the music block.

“Is that it?” Stunned, Alice stares at the closed doors. “He’s not going after them?”

Loman smiles. “Do you think he should?”

Alice’s eyes widen. “Yes! Teachers are never cool about bullying. Especially Mr Barker.” She marches over to the door. “I’m going to talk to him. It’s your first day!”

Loman holds up a hand. “It’s okay, honestly. I’m fine. Come on, it’s break. Show me the rest of the school—Danny’s not wrong, I really could use some more directions.”

Reluctantly, Alice nods and walks with Cam and Loman back towards the main building, a two-floor block built sometime in the 1960s.

“Here’s where we do maths,” Cam says. “Top floor, mostly. Humanities—history, geography, foreign languages—is on the bottom floor. And there’s the hall, well, the small hall. The big one’s over there, where we do indoor P.E. and whole school assemblies. That sort of thing.”

They pause outside one of the entrances to Main. “We’ve got French after break,” says Alice. “We could head there now?”

Cam is about to reply when the door opens and Mr Barker walks out, nods a brief greeting to the trio, and strides in the direction of the science block.

“Was that...?” Alice swallows.

“Yes.” Cam stares after the retreating figure.

“Didn’t he...?” She glances towards the music block on the other side of campus, frowning in confusion.

“Yes.”

They both turn to Loman. Cam coughs. “Okay, that was weird. Even for here.”

Alice glances at Cam. “Even for you,” she adds. “That was weird even for you.”

Cam grimaces. “Thanks.” She’s right though. He’s used to Mum materialising in different rooms in their three-storey Victorian house because she gets bored of using the stairs. But he never suspected Mr Barker of being able to jump from one side of school to the other in the blink of an eye.

Loman looks confused. “Wasn’t he the same teacher as before?”

“Yes,” Cam and Alice reply simultaneously.

“Mr Barker,” Cam explains. “Our form teacher. Who may or may not be a clone, or apparently have access to a hidden teleporting machine in the back of the music block.”

Alice sniffs and flicks a length of multi-coloured hair back over her shoulder. “I always thought there was something suspicious about Mrs Havinter,” she says.

Loman laughs. “Or he was an illusion,” he offers.

Cam considers this for a moment. “Or that,” he concedes. “He did behave rather out of character.”

The bell for the end of break rings, and they stroll inside. Being the first ones in, they get the premium seats at the back of the classroom, tucked away in a corner by the window.

“You didn’t do the homework,” Alice murmurs as she sits by the wall, quietly enough that Mr Gale, who’s busy on his computer, can’t hear her. “Want to copy?”

Cam gratefully accepts her offer and copies out her answers into his book, writing Saturday’s date at the top of the page. He adds in a few errors—wouldn’t do to be found with identical answers, and Mr Gale knows French isn’t his best subject—and Alice has her book back by the time the last stragglers have sauntered into the room.

“Bonjour, bonjour, asseyez-vous s’il vous plait,” Mr Gale murmurs as he stands. “Merci, merci. Yes, thank you, Amelia and Chris, if you could stop talking now.”

Loman yawns.

“Aaah, we have a new student!” Mr Gale homes in on Loman like a searchlight. “Bonjour! Comment t’appelles-tu?”

Loman looks at him blankly, then says, with an entirely straight face, “Jag heter Loman Lykill.”

Mr Gale’s round face gains a look of confusion. “Pardon? I’m sorry, that’s not French, young man.”

“No, it’s Swedish,” Loman says. “Sorry, I thought you were sharing what language you could speak. I thought I would do the same.”

Two spots of pink appear on the teacher’s cheeks, and he inhales deeply. “Well, this is a French class—Loman, was it?—and in here we try to keep it to French.”

Loman leans over to whisper in Cam’s ear. “How awfully dull. I think everyone should speak something different. Truly multicultural.”

Having recovered, Mr Gale returns to the front of the classroom and clears his throat. “Right, let’s see what we can remember from last week. Who can tell me something about a member of their family? Yes, Adrianna.”

“Meine mutter hat braune haare,” says Adrianna, a petite girl who’s always at the top of the class academically. She stops speaking and looks at the teacher, mortified. “I’m—I’m sorry, Mr Gale! I meant to say my mother has brown hair.”

“Which I think you succeeded at,” Mr Gale says, sounding rather bemused, “but in German this time. Apparently, Master Lykill’s linguistic talents are spreading.”

Adrianna exchanges a look with the girl sitting next to her, and they both turn to stare at Loman. In turn, Loman smiles his wide, charming grin at them both and nods towards the teacher.

“Sorry, sir,” he says. “Can’t think how that could have happened. I must be a bad influence or something.”

“Quite.” Mr Gale shakes his head and sighs. “Anyone else? Yes, Brynn. In French, if you please.”

“Of course,” says Brynn. They straighten in their seat, adjust their glasses, and haltingly say, “Mi padre tiene cuarenta años.”

The class bursts into muffled laughter, which is sharply mocking from Danny’s crew, and Mr Gale frowns. “I don’t know what sort of joke you think you’re playing, but I assure you, Mr Barker will not be pleased when he hears about this. Brynn, I expect better from you.”

Humiliated, Brynn blushes pink to the tips of their ears and stares down at their book, not meeting anyone’s gaze. Cam recognises that look and wishes he could convey his understanding and sympathy through telepathy.

“Which Mr Barker?” Alice mutters to Cam. “If it’s the one who ignored Danny earlier, I doubt he’ll give a—”

“Alice, well volunteered,” snaps Mr Gale, whose calm and relaxed manner has evaporated since class 7TB entered his room. “French. This is a French lesson. En Français s’il vous plait.”

Alice raises her eyebrows. “Mr Gale, I...”

The teacher folds his arms and narrows his eyes. “Tell us something about your family. In French. Please.”

“Go on,” Cam whispers. “Just read out part of your homework.”

She glances at her book, which is open from where he was copying it, and nods. “Otōto ga imasu,” she mutters.

This time, the laughter is less muffled and more howls of amusement. Class 7TB sounds as if they’ve been possessed by hyenas.

Mr Gale’s face turns pink, and he glares at Alice. “What. Was. That?”

“Japanese, sir, I think,” says Loman, extremely helpfully, with his most brilliant smile on full, dazzling display. “I think she said she has a brother.”

Alice thumps her head against the table and makes a strange, strangled noise.

“I. See.” Mr Gale goes to the door and opens it onto the corridor. Cam hears something that sounds like Mr Gale trying not to swear too loudly, then footsteps approach. “Aah, Mrs Collier. Do you think you could, um, watch my class for a moment or two? I, er, left something in the staff room. Just... put the video on?”

Mrs Collier, a history teacher who was apparently born before a sense of humour was invented, walks into the classroom. Mr Gale leaves. Presumably, Cam suspects, to go and scream in frustration in the staff room or bang his head against a wall.

They watch videos in French for the rest of the lesson; Mr Gale does not return.

Chapter 7

“That,” Alice says, stuffing her face with a Nutella sandwich, “was officially the weirdest French lesson I’ve ever been in.”

“Never mind French.” Cam rifles through his bag to find what Frankie’s packed for his lunch. “That was the weirdest lesson, full stop.”

He’s a bit jealous of Alice, who gets to make her own lunches. On the other hand, she also has to do the food shopping with whatever money she can take out of her mum’s purse before it gets spent on other things, so maybe he can cope with Frankie’s intriguing concoctions. He hands Alice one of his two apples—Frankie always packs him two pieces of fruit—and tucks into a pasta salad.

“Loman’s a bit odd,” Alice muses as she pockets the apple. “I mean, look.” She gestures over to the queue for hot dinners, where Loman is cheerfully chatting to a blonde girl in year nine. As they watch, the girl laughs and lets Loman go in front of her.

“Was that...?”

“Evie Stephens,” Alice confirms. “Yes. Yes, it was.”

“Evie whose brother got expelled?”

“Yes.”

“Evie who speaks to nobody?”

“Yes.”

Cam stares at his new friend, who’s demonstrating an ability to balance a tray on each hand. Evie, who may or may not have stabbed someone with a fork in cookery class, depending on who you listen to, is laughing and clapping. Other people in the line are also starting to laugh and point at something Cam can’t see.

“That’s just... unsettling,” Cam says.

After a few minutes, Loman and Evie saunter over, each carrying a tray. It takes Cam a moment or two to figure out what else is strange in this scenario—aside from the sight of Evie voluntarily hanging out with another person—and then he realises what they’ve got for dinner.

“Is that McDonald’s?”

Loman grins. “Of course not. They’d never sell McDonald’s in a school.” He unwraps something that looks suspiciously like an extremely fresh Big Mac and takes a slurp from a white paper cup with a large yellow ‘H’ printed on the side. “This is only a burger and fries. Perfectly normal.”

Cam has seen the cafeteria’s ideas of what a burger and fries look like, and they bear only a passing resemblance to food. This is not perfectly normal. They don’t serve Coca-Cola in white paper cups, and the burgers definitely don’t come wrapped in paper printed with yellow ‘H’s.

On the other hand, Loman and Evie—and apparently a dozen other pupils—are clearly eating burgers and fries. And he did watch them get their lunch at the cafeteria. So it’s not like he can ignore that. Cam makes a mental note to speak to Mum and Frankie when he gets home because there is clearly something exceptionally strange going on at school today.

––––––––

THE AFTERNOON PROVES to be equally weird. In maths, the smart board will only display the presentation upside down, so Mrs Walker gives up and hands out the test they were supposed to be doing on Wednesday. Most of the class groan and complain, but Cam quite enjoys tests. It’s quiet, and he can think and solve problems, and he doesn’t have to interact with anybody.

P.E., which follows, is downright odd. They do cross-country which, as far as Cam is concerned, is a P.E. teacher’s answer to ‘I forgot to plan a lesson for year seven’.

“Off you go, no cheating!” Mr Hall grins at them, and thirty children set off in white t-shirts and green shorts, jostling for space.

Cam settles into the middle of the pack, where he’s comfortably unnoticed, and enjoys running. It’s something he’s good at, and he’s not part of a team, which means he can’t let anyone down. He relaxes into his rhythm and the thud-thud-thud of his trainers hitting damp grass as the class makes their way around the edge of the field and past the hockey pitch. At the back of the field, he passes Loman, who’s leaning against the fence—built so high it wouldn’t look out of place surrounding a maximum-security prison yard—and watching everyone go past with a curious smile.

“Mr Hall won’t be happy,” he warns Loman, but the boy simply grins at him. Josh, who’s passing by, gives Cam a strange look, but that’s nothing new. Cam’s used to being on the receiving end of strange looks at school.

As he starts his second lap, he spots Alice standing to one side, next to the teacher, her face like thunder. Amy-Lou, looking muddy and tearful, is there as well. Cam gives Alice a sympathetic look, but she just glares, so he keeps on running.

Loman hasn’t moved from his spot, where he’s gleefully loitering and openly grinning at the stragglers. Cam shakes his head, then continues. Thud-thud-thud.

He pounds along the final stretch of wet grass and joins the growing group of kids who’ve finished. Loman is there, laughing and joking with Callum and Jack.

“Hey, Cam!” he waves, and Cam jogs over. Callum, one of Danny’s football bros, gives him a dirty look but stays silent. He’s not so bad, Cam thinks, compared to Danny and Jack, at any rate. They used to be friends, back in primary school, before Danny joined the class in year five. Danny changed everything.

“How’d you get here so quick?” he asks Loman, a little breathless.

Loman claps him on the shoulder. “I run fast, I guess,” he says, grinning. “Nobody’s ever caught me. Yet. Well, maybe once.” A shadow briefly crosses his expression, gone before Cam can even be sure he saw it.

“But—” Cam glances across the field to the back fence, where the last three children, including Brynn, are walking—much to Mr Hall’s irritation.

As the teacher raises his voice to ‘encourage’ the final dawdlers, Loman gives Cam a questioning glance. “You okay?”

“Didn’t see you come past me,” Cam says, frowning.

The blonde kid runs a hand through tangled curls, pushing them back out of his eyes. “Like I said, I run fast. Listen, I’ve got to head off at the end of school. But I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?”

And Cam, like the idiot he is, nods and says, “Sure. See you tomorrow.”

––––––––

AT THE END OF THE DAY, when he’s finally changed back into his uniform and shoved his sweaty and muddy kit into its bag, Cam is relieved to find Danny and co. have already left. Alice is hanging around by the P.E. hall doors, bounce-kicking her own kit bag up and down on one booted foot. The tips of her hair are now a sort of bluish-green; she must’ve gotten bored with a Sharpie while she was waiting. Despite the overcast sky and threat of drizzle, her hoodie is tied around her waist, leaving her freckled arms bare.

“Oh, look, here comes Christmas,” she says as he approaches. “Discover you can freeze time while you were in there?”

“Ha ha. You’re hilarious.”

She grins and swings her P.E. bag over her shoulder. “No blonde shadow?”

“He’s gone home,” Cam says. “Why were you stood out in cross country?”

Alice wrinkles her nose and sticks her tongue out at him. “I tripped Amy-Lou. And I might’ve stood on her hand.”

“On purpose?” He needs to clarify; you never know with Alice.

She shrugs. “I didn’t actually break her fingers; she just makes an awful fuss and moans about everything. And now I have to go see Mrs Winters again. You didn’t need to look so smug, either.”

Cam elbows her. “I wasn’t looking smug—I was trying to look sympathetic.”

“And what was with Loman lurking at the back of the field? Mr Hall never seemed to see him standing there.”

He stops and stares at her. “You saw him too?”

“Duh. I thought Mr Hall was gonna go ballistic at him.”

Cam thinks back. “I don’t know... no, that’s ridiculous.”

“What?”

“I don’t know if anyone else saw him there.”

Alice gives him a sharp glance. “What d’you mean?”

“I mean, I spoke to him. I didn’t see anyone else talking to him. Or looking at him. Like, he was invisible to them. Josh looked at me really weird when I spoke to Loman.”

“Josh always looks at you weird. He considers anyone who doesn’t live for football to be a freak.” She shrugs. “Ignore them.”

He starts walking again. “It’s not that, it’s just... I don’t know. Something feels strange today.”

“Your kind of strange? Like...” She waggles her blue ink-stained fingers at him.

“I don’t know.” He seems to have been saying that a lot, recently. Turns out he really doesn’t know very much at all.

“Are you going to speak to your mum about it?”

Cam grimaces. “If I do, she’ll be convinced it’s something to do with the book.”

“You have the power to make people invisible? That’d be kinda cool.”

“And make everyone in French speak a different language, or the maths board stop working, or provide not-quite-McDonald’s for a handful of students at lunch?” Cam scowls and kicks a stray stone into the middle of the road. “No, thanks. School’s hard enough work as it is. I don’t need anything else to worry about.”

He stomps along, half-listening to Alice as she deliberates out loud about how cool it’d be if you could make other people or objects invisible. The other half of his brain is thinking about Loman. Everything definitely became stranger when he arrived.

“Tomorrow will be better,” he mutters, mostly to himself. “It has to be.”

Chapter 8

After dinner, Mum goes upstairs to do some sorting, leaving Cam and his aunt alone in the sitting room. The table is now empty of presents and the Book has gone back under Mum’s bed, and now only a handful of bright and cheerful cards remain. Frankie gestures, and a green bottle drifts over to her and pours itself into the empty glass in her hand. She gives Cam an appraising look and purses her lips. “You say this boy just showed up?”

Cam slumps into the sofa and picks at a hole in his cuff. “Yup.” Dorian, the grey family cat, sidles over in search of a lap. After a moment’s consideration, he sprawls himself contentedly across Cam’s legs. Cam scritches the cat behind his ears, in the spot Dorian loves, and the cat begins to purr like a concrete mixer.

“And then all the strange things started happening.” Frankie takes a sip of her wine. “Do you think he’s another witch?”

“How am I supposed to know? It’s not like I can ask him! ‘Hi, there, Loman. I know you’re new and all, but don’t suppose you happen to possess magical powers?’ I don’t think so.”

His aunt gives him a disapproving look. “There are other ways,” she says. “Ones that can be more... subtle. Come with me.”

Reluctantly, Cam shifts Dorian off his lap. The cat grumbles before settling and curling into a ball on the warm space Cam vacates. He follows Frankie up the winding stairs to the third floor and her room, where he hangs back in the doorway. Frankie’s bedroom is one of those places that’s always been off-limits, ever since he was old enough to walk, and old habits die hard.

“Come on,” she says, sitting at her desk and tugging open a drawer. A black notebook floats up out of it and opens itself on the surface before her. “Don’t just stand there like a lemon.”

“Lemons don’t have legs,” he mutters, but he moves to stand beside her anyway. Frankie’s room smells of cinnamon and vanilla, like she does, and it’s warm and inviting, filled with deep reds and purples, soft furnishings and bookcases. A safe place.

“Now,” she taps the book and the pages flutter like paper wings. “In here should be what we’re looking for. Let me see... Ah-hah!” She jabs a finger, pinning a page still. “There.”

A green pen scribbles a few ingredients down while she dictates them, signing off with a flourish on the pad of paper next to her. “We should have all of these in the kitchen. Before we go down there, though, sit.”

Cam perches on the end of Frankie’s bed and she watches him with bright blue eyes.

“This is bothering you,” she says. “All of this. Libris Sapientia, this new kid, the bullying. How can I help?”

He stares at her. “How did you know? About the bullies?”

She gives him a wry smile. “I was twelve too, you know. Not as long ago as you might like to imagine. Kids are horrible—present company excluded, of course.”

“Yeah... well.” Cam drops his gaze to the red carpet and fiddles with one of the tassels on the end of Frankie’s bed throw. “I mean, it’s okay. They’re not too bad.”

“You want me to have a word?”

The idea fills him with horror, which clearly shows on his face as she laughs.

“Don’t worry; I won’t. It just felt like I ought to offer. How about I pretend there’s a poltergeist in the bully’s house?”

Her suggestion brings a reluctant smile to Cam’s face. He imagines Danny sat on a floating bed, with all his stuff swirling around him like a tornado.

Frankie grins and sips her wine. “I could, you know. If you wanted. Might take him down a peg or two.”

It’s tempting, Cam admits. Maybe too tempting. He wonders how Danny would react, and if it might shut him up for a bit. But then there’d be Jack, and Josh, and all the others. No, it would be easier to be invisible. It’s a shame Alice’s theory wasn’t right—he’d tried it on the way home, just in case, and both of them had remained stubbornly visible despite his best efforts.

“It could be you,” Frankie says, suddenly. “Doing all these things, I mean.”

“Doesn’t feel like it’s me.”

“What were you thinking? In the French lesson, I mean?”

He casts his mind back. “I don’t know. How quickly I could copy Alice’s homework, I guess.”

His aunt raises an eyebrow. “Skipping past the outrageous cheating—because I did it too, but don’t tell your mother—anything else?”

He considers this. “No, no, nothing else. Not really. Um.”

“Hmm. And what about at the other times? Dinner, the maths lesson, P.E...?”

“Not much.”

“Doesn’t seem likely to be you,” she agrees, standing. “But it does seem weird. I’ll keep thinking on it. Let’s go to the kitchen and make cookies.”

Confused, Cam gets to his feet. “Cookies?”

“Or whatever else you think your friends might like to eat. I figure cookies’re a safe bet for most teenagers. Come on.”

––––––––

IN THE KITCHEN, FRANKIE rules and Cam obeys. He dutifully weighs out ingredients—some of them rather unusual for cookies, but Frankie knows what she’s doing. She sets him to chopping chunks of chocolate and chatters on about different types of sugar and flavours and toffee until the mix is ready to go in the oven.

Mum steps out of the shadow by the freezer. “What’re you two up to?”

Frankie, tray of unbaked triple chocolate deliciousness in her hands, pauses in front of the oven. “Testing a theory.”

“Which is?”

“Nobody can resist the lure of cookies.” She opens the oven and slides the tray in, shutting the door quickly to keep the heat inside. “And I thought we agreed, no shifting inside the house?”

Cam glances from his mum to his aunt and back again.

Mum shrugs. “I was in the attic; it was a long way downstairs. And you use your powers all the time.” She waves a hand at the sink, where the washing up is doing itself with great enthusiasm.

Frankie rolls her eyes. “That’s different. You lurk.”

Smiling, Mum laughs and changes the subject back. “Why are you baking? We’ve just eaten dinner.”

“Like I said, Cam and I are testing a theory. About his new friend, Loman.”

A plate wobbles on the drying rack, teeters on the edge for half a second, then falls to the floor. Cam instinctively tries to catch it but misses, and then shards of cheap china are strewn across the tiles.

With an apologetic grimace, Frankie crouches and begins picking up the pieces. “Sorry. I was thinking about other things.”

Cam hurries to assist. “She was only trying to help me, Mum. Honest.”

Mum catches a second plate mid-wobble and puts it flat on the worktop. “What’s your theory?”

“He might be a witch,” Frankie answers, gathering the bits of broken plate and dumping them into an empty cat food box. “So, we’re testing that.”

“With cookies?”

Frankie grins. “With my cookies. If he’s a witch, he’ll be forced to use his power.”

Cam glances at the oven and a thought occurs to him. “They’re not just for Loman, are they?”

His aunt’s grin grows wider and she looks at Mum. “See, not as daft as he looks.”

“Oi!” Cam nudges her—gently—and wrinkles his nose. “Meany.”

“Yes, you can have one as well. When they’re cooked. And cool enough to eat.”

“So, go and do some of your homework,” Mum finishes. “I’m sure you have plenty.”

And Cam does, so he trudges dutifully off upstairs, wishing he had his mum’s power, as there seem to be more stairs in this house every day.

Twenty minutes and half a page of English later, there’s a knock on his bedroom door. Frankie pokes her head round and waves a plate with a couple of cookies on it.

“Warm out of the oven,” she announces. “Want to try?”

Even if they hadn’t been magical cookies, he would have inhaled them on the spot. The smell is amazing. Cam grabs the plate and is munching on one before he remembers to say, “Thanks, Frankie.”

She gives him a radiant smile. “It’s what aunts are for. Good luck, Cam.”

The cookies are delicious, regardless of any magical ingredients, and he’s eaten both before he remembers he should really be getting on with his homework. They have to write a persuasive argument about whether school uniforms should be compulsory. He’s mostly done, and all that’s left is to write his conclusion.

It’s important,

he writes in his final paragraph,

to remember that everyone is individual. As teenagers we are discovering many things about ourselves, and we should have the opportunity to express aspects of our personalities if we want to. I wish all the staff had to wear identical clothes, just for one day, so they could see what it feels like to be in our shoes. Then they might change the way they felt about school uniform being mandatory.

Putting down his pen, Cam reads through the page. It’ll do.

It’s only later, as he’s brushing his teeth, that he realises the cookies haven’t done anything for him, except taste amazing. Figures. He is a failure, after all.

Chapter 9

Cam is on time for school, which makes a pleasant change. He even has enough spare minutes to finish off his science homework while sitting at the back of the classroom. It’s all to do with forces, and he finds himself idly wondering how the laws of physics apply to the laws of magic. Maybe Newton might have changed his mind if he’d seen Frankie’s car lift itself off the ground in order for a stray kitten to be rescued from underneath. Or maybe magic is an unstoppable force.

When Loman arrives, he flings his bag onto the table next to Cam and throws himself into the neighbouring chair with a grin. “Ready for Wednesday?” he asks. “I’ve got a feeling it’ll be entertaining.”

Cam manages a smile in response before Mr Barker marches into the room and slams a folder onto his desk. He’s wearing a bright orange sweater, which makes him look rather like a traffic cone in a very bad mood. Cam slips his science book into his bag and tries to appear normal and unobtrusive. He might be on time, but he’s forgotten the stupid permission slip again, and Mr Barker doesn’t look in a particularly forgiving mood.

Everyone seems to pick up on the teacher’s attitude, and the class falls uncharacteristically silent. Mr Barker lives up to his name and barks his way through the register. When he gets to Alice, there’s a pause, and he glances up, honing straight in on Cam.

“Where is she now?”

“With Mrs Winters, sir. She had to have an extra appointment this morning,” Cam explains.

“Because she broke my fingers,” Amy-Lou butts in, holding up a bandaged hand as evidence. “She’s violent, sir. She shouldn’t be in this school.”

Mr Barker doesn’t bother to respond to Amy-Lou’s comment, just scribbles something on a post-it note and adds it to his overflowing diary with a sigh. He finishes calling the register, then picks up a sheet of paper. Heart thumping, Cam tries to think invisible thoughts.

“Science and Media Museum,” Mr Barker says, and a quiet groan ripples through the classroom. “Fraser, I have your slip. Loman, I have yours – which is impressive, because you’ve been here all of twenty-four hours. Unlike Cameron, who has been here two months and can’t remember to bring in half the things he needs.”

Loman nods and slides something across the table without looking at Cam.

“I assume yours still hasn’t made it into school?” Mr Barker asks, his glare fierce enough to strip paint off the wall behind Cam.

Cam glances at the table and whatever Loman passed his way. It’s a piece of paper—a permission slip. With his mum’s signature.

“It was on the floor,” Loman whispers. “Must’ve fallen out of your bag.”

Cam doesn’t ask. He silently retrieves the slip and holds it for Mr Barker to see.

“Wonders will never cease,” Mr Barker says drily. “Well, where should it be?”

“On your desk,” Cam says, as he stands up and hurries to the front of the classroom, trying to ignore the stares from everyone watching him. As he drops back into his seat, cheeks flushed with embarrassment, Loman beams at him.

“It wasn’t in my bag,” Cam whispers, after Mr Barker’s attention has shifted to questioning Jasmine’s jewellery. “I know it wasn’t. Because I forgot to take the letter home.”

Loman shrugs. “Maybe the office emailed your mum.”

“She doesn’t have a printer.”

“Does it matter? You’re not in trouble now.”

“I guess not.” Cam doesn’t push the matter any further—it’s nice to have someone other than Alice who’ll willingly sit next to him in class, but he adds it to his expanding mental list of Extremely Weird Stuff Going On.

––––––––

MRS WALKER IS ALSO wearing bright orange. In fact, her jumper looks surprisingly similar to Mr Barker’s. Her scowl is also familiar, and Cam sidles into the maths classroom in silent apprehension. Thankfully, the board is working properly today. After receiving his suitably average test score from the previous day, Cam settles into the comfortable predictability of angles and triangles.

Except, it should be predictable. But it isn’t for everyone.

“Mrs Walker,” Danny puts his hand up. “My triangle doesn’t add up to 180° on question three.”

“I can reassure you it does,” Mrs Walker says, and walks over to Danny’s table. “Show me.”

Cam checks his question three, which adds up fine, and continues with his work. A minute or so later, Mrs Walker’s voice raises in confusion.

“How ridiculous! Right, is anyone else struggling on question three?”

A few people sheepishly raise their hands, and Mrs Walker marches to the whiteboard.

“Let’s look at it together,” she announces, drawing a straight line on the board. “So, our first angle is...”

They work through it as a class, following the instructions exactly as Cam did. It adds up to 184°.

Mrs Walker frowns. She checks her numbers.

Cam checks his work again. It looks the same as the teacher’s, except his totals to an exact 180°, and he can’t see where it’s different. He glances sideways at Loman, who is leaning back in his chair, trying unsuccessfully to hide the smirk on his face. He’s definitely involved in all of this weirdness somehow, Cam decides.

Eventually, Mrs Walker sighs, shakes her head, and says, “Move on to question 4. I think there’s a mistake in the book.”

––––––––

AT BREAK, CAM, ALICE and Loman sit on one of the benches at the side of the field and ignore the boys pelting a football around with noisy enthusiasm.

“I brought cookies,” Cam says, offering them around. He’d checked with Frankie that there wouldn’t be any nasty side-effects if a non-witch ate them—although given he was perfectly fine after eating them yesterday, it seemed unlikely.

“Oooh!” Alice grabs one and is in the middle of stuffing it into her mouth before she asks, indistinctly, “Did Frankie make them?”

“We made them together.”

“Mmm...” Alice beams and finishes her cookie. Cam’s not even sure it touches the sides on the way down.

Loman is equally delighted by the addition of chocolate to a drizzly break time, and Cam tries hard not to watch the blonde boy eating.

“’s good,” Loman says, munching with evident delight. “Who’s Frankie?”

“She’s a wi—wonderful cook. Cam’s auntie,” Alice explains before Cam has a chance to open his mouth. “She makes awesome food happen. It’s like magic.” She winks at Cam, who nearly falls off his bench.

“This tastes amazing,” Loman says, licking the final crumbs from his fingers. “Is that cinnamon?”

Cam thinks back to the kitchen. “Err... probably?” The idea that Loman might spontaneously do something magical nibbles away at his brain, so much so that he can’t concentrate on much else. What might Loman do?

A horrible thought strikes out of the blue. What if Loman does something awful? Would that be Cam’s fault for provoking it? So far, all of the weird stuff seems to have been harmless pranks—but there’s no way of knowing if Loman could do something more dangerous.

And it’s not like he can ask for the cookie back, now.

“I have to go to the toilet,” Cam mumbles, shoving a handful of loose things into his bag. “See you in history.” Before either of them can respond, he stumbles away in a half-run towards the nearest building. He’s going to throw up. Chunks of Frankie’s chocolate cookie feel like they’re stuck in his throat. How could he be so stupid?

In the end, he’s not sick, but the tangle of nerves and anxiety in his stomach wraps like a python around his throat until he’s sure the possibilities are trying to strangle him. He sits on the closed toilet in a locked cubicle, feet tucked up, and stares blankly at the graffiti on the inside of the door. It doesn’t matter how many times the doors are cleaned or repainted or whatever; there will always be an enterprising pupil with a biro and a spare minute to scrawl something across any empty canvas.

Cam doesn’t read any of it—barely even registers it as words. He’s going to be late for history, but he can’t find the willpower to move from his perch.

How did Frankie not see this coming? He could have unleashed a monster on his school—and while he would quite happily sit back and watch the whole miserable place burn, there are people he cares about here. Alice, for one.

And he’s left her alone with Loman.

Cam slams his head back against the wall with a thunk, hard enough to make him regret doing it. He’s been even more of an idiot than usual; how did he not think about this before running off?

Swallowing the acidic taste of sour failure and cookies, and ignoring the growing ache in his skull, Cam miserably slouches his way to history and whatever hideous doom awaits him.

Chapter 10

It turns out all that is waiting for Cam in the history room is an irate Mrs Abbott, who snaps at him to sit down before continuing as if she’d never been interrupted. Teachers seemed to have that skill in spades: the ability to seamlessly break their speech in order to tell someone off, then continue their original sentence without faltering.

Staring at Mrs Abbott’s lurid orange sweater, Cam slinks into a seat next to Alice.

“Where were you?” Alice whispers. “You were ages. Are you okay?”

Cam wants to say no, he’s not okay. He’s not been okay for quite some time, and he is most definitely Not Okay today. Instead, he shrugs, opens his history book, and writes the date at the top of a new page. If only everything were as simple. Start each day afresh with a blank page, a clean slate. Instead, he seems to start every day with the smudges and mess of the previous day lingering, making his clean page grubby and stained before he’s even begun.

He glances around and notices another absence. “Where’s Loman?” he murmurs to Alice.

She gives a little shake of her head. Not a clue, the gesture says. Your guess is as good as mine.

They’re halfway through the lesson when the door opens and Loman enters. He takes one look at Mrs Abbott’s tangerine-coloured top and bursts out laughing.

“And who, might I ask, are you?” Mrs Abbott looks even less impressed with Loman’s entrance than she had with Cam’s. If her narrowed eyes could shoot lasers, the blonde kid would have two holes bored into his head. Her lips purse together in outraged disapproval, the sort of face Frankie refers to as ‘a cat’s butt’.

Loman gives an extravagant bow, waving a hand in a flourish, and introduces himself.

Cam closes his eyes. Confrontations make him queasy, and he can feel the churning in his stomach already. Please don’t yell, he thinks, pressing his fingernails into his palms. Please don’t shout.

The room fills with silence like a bubble about to burst.

Cam sneaks a peek. To his great surprise, Mrs Abbott’s death-stare and cat’s-bum mouth have eased into an expression which could almost be called ‘friendly’. He’s not sure if friendliness is a concept she’s familiar with, as he’s only ever seen her looking either disapproving, angry, or disappointed.

“Come in, come in,” Mrs Abbott says, gesturing at the couple of empty seats. “Don’t worry about being late—starting at a new school can take some getting used to.”

Cam and Alice stare at each other. Mrs Abbott, who’s been teaching history since it began, is a stickler for punctuality. And here she is, telling someone not to worry about being late?

“The world’s going to end tomorrow,” Alice mutters darkly. “It’s the only explanation.”

Loman strolls nonchalantly into the room, winks at Cam, and drops into the inevitable empty seat next to him. “Did I miss anything?” he asks, noisily rustling his bag and dumping books and stationery onto the table.

“Oh, just half the lesson,” snaps Alice. “But apparently Mrs Abbott doesn’t mind when it’s you. Which is weird.”

Loman doesn’t reply, simply gives her an unreadable smile and opens his book.

“Luddites,” Cam whispers. “Didn’t like technology. Burnt down mills and stuff.”

“Good times,” Loman says, writing the date. “Chaos is always more interesting.”

––––––––

CAM SPENDS THE REST of the lesson considering his friend’s statement. Is chaos more interesting than the alternative? He doesn’t think so. Life is easier when it’s all organised, isn’t it? On the other hand, Frankie seems to thrive on chaos, and Alice is like a natural disaster moving through the world, and she doesn’t seem too fussed by it, either. Maybe it is just him.

The thought bothers him more than he cares to admit, so when the lesson finishes, he shoves his stuff into his bag and makes his way to English without waiting for Loman or Alice. He wants the space to think, but he’s not going to get that here.

Mr Harris is wearing a bright orange sweater, and Cam stops in the classroom door so suddenly that the two people behind him pile into his bag.

“What the—?” Archie grumbles, shoving Cam roughly to one side and squeezing past him into the room. “Move it, hobbit.”

Cam stumbles into the room, staring at his teacher. Four teachers with orange jumpers on. Maybe it’s some sort of charity event or something.

“Everything all right, Cam?” Mr Harris asks.

“Er... yeah. Sorry.” Cam somehow finds a seat and is still trying to figure out why everything has become so incredibly weird, when Alice enters the room like a thundercloud in an atrocious mood and hurls her bag onto the table next to him. Wincing, Cam risks a sideways glance at his friend to find her glaring at him.

“Did I say something?” she asks, slamming her tattered English book onto the desk. “Did I offend you in some way? Or are you being a complete and utter—”

Loman claps her on the shoulder as he saunters past. “Ease off, Alley-cat,” he says. “Cam’s had a busy few days. Probably needed some time to himself.”

Alice turns her furious glower to him. “And what would you know about that, Mr I’ve-been-in-this-school-for-a-day? And if you call me ‘Alley-cat’ again, I’ll make you bleed.”

Loman grins at her and ducks a low-flying copy of Beowulf.

Cam’s only partly paying attention to his friends’ bickering. Something’s nagging at him, tickling at the edge of his brain, just out of reach of his thoughts. He’s written something, or read something, to explain why all the teachers are wearing orange today. And he has a sneaking suspicion it might be his fault.

Eventually, the class is in and settled, and Mr Harris begins picking apart more of the story. This means Cam has time to zone out and think.

At least Loman doesn’t seem to have exploded the school, or poisoned anyone, or any of the hundred terrible things Cam had thought might happen. In fact, other than Mrs Abbott’s personality transplant, nothing strange seems to have happened at all since they ate the cookies at break.

Which is why, when a huge, black bird flies in through one of the open windows, Cam is one of the few students not to yell or scream. The bird circles the room twice, then lands. It’s even bigger than Cam had initially thought, around two feet from its head to the tip of its tail. Thick, shaggy black feathers ring around its throat, and it watches the class with a curiously intelligent expression, head tilted to one side.

Mr Harris is surprisingly calm. He sets his copy of Beowulf on his desk and folds his arms, looking at the bird perched on top of a filing cabinet.

“Goodness me,” he says, taking off his glasses, polishing them quickly on the edge of his orange sweater, and replacing them with trembling hands. “Corvus corax. What on earth are you doing here?”

“Friend of yours, sir?” asks one of the boys, and a few nervous titters of laughter echo around the room.

Mr Harris ignores the comments and takes a step closer to the uninvited guest. “This is a raven,” he says. “Largest member of the Corvus family.”

“It looks like a crow,” says Abby.

“That’s because it’s related to the crow.” Mr Harris stops a couple of metres away from the cabinet. “Like magpies and rooks. They’re all part of the same bird family.”

“Is it dangerous?” someone asks.

“They used to eat bodies on battlefields, didn’t they?” someone else pipes up, and then it’s a general free-for-all.

“They’re at the Tower of London. I saw them there. D’you think that’s where this one came from?”

“Don’t be stupid; London’s miles away.”

“Well, if pigeons can fly hundreds of miles, and a pigeon’s like, this big, then a giant great black eagle—sorry, crow—sorry! raven—can probably manage it as well.”

Mr Harris is opening his mouth, probably to say something like ‘be quiet’, when the raven’s beak opens, and it makes a sound like a creaky door hinge on full volume. The room falls silent.

“Umm, Mr Harris?”

“Yes, Thomas?”

“How’re you going to get it to leave?”

“Maybe you could, like, lure it out with some food or something?” suggests someone else.

Cam’s sure the raven is looking at him. If a bird could look intelligent, this one certainly does. The bird makes a strange rasping croak, hops off the cabinet, drifts across the classroom on wide wings, and comes to land on the table in front of Cam and Loman.

“Er...” says Cam, shuffling his chair back as far as it will go. Up close, the beak is rather large, rather hard, and definitely dangerous.

“Stay still,” says Loman, his voice low and calm. “She won’t hurt you. Huginn or Muninn?” he murmurs, looking directly into the black eyes of the bird. “I can never remember which one’s which. I’m afraid you both look the same to me. Either way, you can’t stay here.” He pushes his chair back and stands, holding out an arm. “Come on.”

The raven makes what sounds like a reluctant croak of agreement, flaps its wings once, and hops onto Loman’s outstretched arm. A collective sound of awe ripples around the room as Loman makes his way slowly to the open window, carrying the massive bird on his wrist.

As he reaches the window, the bird makes a disapproving creak, spreads its wings to their full span, and launches itself back out into the open air.

The class erupts into enthusiastic cheers, and Loman, with the faintest hint of a blush colouring his cheeks, grins.

Cam, cheering along with the rest of them, is thinking furiously. He recognised the names Loman had said, and it’s bothering him. Huginn and Muninn: Thought and Memory. Ravens belonging to Odin, the All-father, king of Asgard and ruler of the Norse gods.

Chapter 11

Science is thankfully uneventful—no birds, no teleporting teachers, no spontaneous eruptions of foreign languages. Miss Garforth has an orange sweater tied around her waist, though, and Cam spends most of the lesson trying to pin down the fidgeting thought he can’t quite remember. He doesn’t take in much of what the teacher’s saying, which is stuff about forces. Probably.

It’s only at the end of the day that everything goes horribly, catastrophically, wrong.

He’s halfway out of the building when he remembers he’s forgotten to pick up the homework sheet from Miss Garforth’s desk.

“We’ll meet you by the gate,” says Alice generously.

“D’you want me to get a sheet for you, too?” Cam offers, but Alice shakes her head.

“Nah, I’ll never do it anyway.” She swings her bag over her shoulder and leaves, Loman trailing behind her. Cam can’t imagine Loman following anyone else like that, he thinks, as he traipses back into the science lab. Alice is like a magnet for the strange, though. And Loman Lykill is definitely strange.

“You’d forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on,” chides Miss Garforth as he retrieves the homework. “See you next week, Cam.”

He gives her a sheepish grin, folds the sheet in half, and hurries out of the room. Bag half-open as he tries to stuff the work in amongst his books, he’s not really looking where he’s going as he exits the building.

Which is why he runs straight into Danny and three of his cronies.

Danny grabs Cam’s bag and tosses it to Jack—a giant of a boy who wouldn’t look out of place in a year ten class. Cam barely comes up to Jack’s shoulders, and he knows from painful experience that it’s not worth trying to grab the bag. Jack would simply hold it up out of his reach and laugh. Shoulders slumped, Cam watches miserably as Jack throws the rucksack back to Danny, who begins to empty it out onto the path.

And then things get even worse.

“What’s this?” Danny pulls the paper shuriken out of Cam’s bag and turns it over in his hands. “Your boyfriend make it? Or your weirdo goth girlfriend?”

Cam clenches his teeth together. “Give it back.”

Danny holds up the piece of origami and grins. “What’s it supposed to be?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, I know.” A wicked smirk twists Danny’s mouth into a sneer. “It’s like a ninja throwing star or something, innit? Hobbit boy’s got a black belt, and now he’s gonna kick us into next week? Oh, I’m so scared!” He holds out his left hand, laughing, and rams the paper star into the middle of his palm.

Instead of the crumple of paper, there’s a shriek of pain. It takes Cam a moment or two to realise part of the star is now stuck deep into Danny’s hand. It must be a trick of the light—or something—because he swears he sees the glint of metal before it’s only pieces of folded lined paper, stained ruby red.

Danny is screaming, “Get it out! Get it out! Oh, God, help!” and waving his hand around as if it’s on fire.

“I’ll get a teacher,” one of his mates says, and two of them sprint away into a building.

Danny sucks in a deep breath, swears, and turns a furious glare to Cam. “You’ll pay for this,” he whines. “You brought a weapon to school. You’re gonna be expelled forever, and... and... I’ll sue you. My brother’s gonna kill you.”

Cam shakes his head in disbelief. “It’s... it’s just paper. I...” He can’t wrap his head around what’s going on. How could a piece of folded paper stab someone? There’s blood on Danny’s sleeve, and even Jack, who plays prop on the lower school rugby team, is looking faintly green around the edges.

And then Loman and Alice are walking towards them, along with Mr Barker and the two boys who’d gone to find a teacher.

Danny swears again. “What are they doing here?”

Alice looks like she’s found a fifty pound note, and her smile could cut glass. Next to her, Loman is the picture of innocence, all blonde, angelic curls and curious expression.

“What happened here?” Mr Barker strides across the grass—where students aren’t supposed to walk—and reaches Cam and Danny in the space of a few seconds.

“Hob—Cam stabbed Danny, sir,” Jack says. “With a...” He falters, glancing at his friend’s injured hand. “I don’t know, Mr Barker.”

Cam opens his mouth to protest, but Mr Barker holds up a hand. “Not a word, Cameron. And nothing from you, either, Danny. Show me your hand.”

Whimpering, Danny holds out his bloodied hand, palm up, to the teacher. His eyes flick to Cam and they hold nothing but flaming fury. Cam withers a little more inside.

Mr Barker glares. “You expect me to believe a bit of origami did this?” He pulls out the scarlet-soaked paper star, half-disintegrated from the blood. “What did you really do?”

“Maybe he fell on broken glass, sir?” Loman says, helpfully. “There’s some out on the field; I saw it earlier.”

“And then tried to get Cameron into trouble,” Mr Barker finishes Loman’s thought. “Right, Cameron, Danny, you two come with me. The rest of you—yes, Jack, including you—get off home.”

“But, Mr Barker—”

“Home. Now.” There’s no room for argument; for once, everyone follows Mr Barker’s instructions.

“We’ll wait for you outside school,” Alice says to Cam, with a meaningful glare at Danny. Translation: You try to hurt our friend and it will go badly for you.

“Your bodyguards won’t always be there, freak,” Danny mutters to Cam, once they’re being marched to the head’s office. Loman and Alice are figures in the distance, keeping apart from the other three boys. Alice carries Cam’s rucksack, having rescued his books and belongings rescued from the path.

For roughly the umpteenth time, Cam wishes the ground would open up and swallow him. There is no obliging earthquake or sinkhole, though, so he is forced to continue walking until he’s sat next to Danny outside the main reception and the closed door to Mrs Jenkins’s office.

The school nurse arrives, takes one look at Danny’s hand, and rounds on Mr Barker with a dismayed expression. “He needs to go to a hospital. That’s going to need stitches.”

Mr Barker heaves a sigh of exasperation. “Of course it does. Fine. Staunch the bleeding. And call his parents.” He knocks on the head’s door, then goes in and shuts it behind him.

Cam stares at the blue carpeted floor.

“Are you hurt?”

“What?” He looks up to find the nurse watching him expectantly.

She repeats the question, and he shakes his head. “No, no, I’m not hurt.”

“Did you see what happened?”

He stabbed himself with a paper shuriken my new friend made for me. Cam shakes his head again. He has no idea how he’s going to get out of this without phone calls home and Mum showing up in full Mama Bear Mode, which is, honestly, the worst thing he could imagine.

Mr Barker emerges from Mrs Jenkins’s office and nods at Cam. “You can go in,” he says.

Silent, Cam gets to his feet and shuffles in through the open door to where the head teacher is waiting behind her desk.

“Cameron,” she says, not unkindly. “Have a seat, please.”

He does as she requests, sitting and watching her while she shuffles a few things around on her desk. Mrs Jenkins is maybe in her fifties, with curling silver hair and a pair of thin, rimless glasses. She’s tall and bony and wears a lot of purple. She’s also the last person he wants to be paying him attention or asking questions.

“What happened?” she asks, settling a paper form in front of her and looking up at him expectantly.

Cam does his best to explain events without lying—he knows he’ll go bright red if he tries, and stumble over words—and without telling the exact truth, either. When he’s finished, Mrs Jenkins lets out a long, slow breath as she considers him.

“And that’s everything? He took your—” she checks her notes “—origami shuriken, and stabbed his hand with it?”

Cam nods. “Yes, Mrs Jenkins.”

“Did you see any blood on his hand before?”

Cam bites his lip. “No, but I wasn’t looking. I just wanted to get away.”

She looks sympathetic. “Does he do this to you a lot? Pick on you, I mean?”

For a moment, Cam considers what would happen if he’s honest with Mrs Jenkins. Would Danny get expelled? Would he be able to go back to living in comfortable anonymity, at the edge of the crowd?

No.

His life would become even worse. Danny’s brother would be here, and if, by some miracle, Danny did leave, there would still be all the others. Only they’d be furious at him for spoiling their fun.

Cam swallows and looks at the green carpet between his scuffed school shoes. “No. He doesn’t.”

Mrs Jenkins makes a ‘hmm’ noise and scribbles something on her sheet of paper.

“Honestly,” Cam continues, feeling as though he’s trying to talk through a lump in his throat. “I’m fine.”

“How about your friends?” Mrs Jenkins asks. “You’re friends with Alice Hawthorn, aren’t you?”

Cam nods and doesn’t meet her eye.

“She’s lucky to have someone like you looking out for her,” the headteacher continues. “Isn’t she?”

“I guess.”

Mrs Jenkins writes something else and seems to come to a conclusion. “Well, as far as I can tell, you seem to have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, Cameron. Go home. Try to avoid Danny, please.” She stands up and goes over to the door, which she opens for him. “Come and see me at any time if you need to,” she says, as Cam passes her. “I mean it. Any time.”

Outside, a gauzy bandage pressed around his bleeding hand, Danny glares daggers at Cam. He doesn’t say anything in front of the head teacher, but he doesn’t need to. His expression says it all.

Cam’s going to pay for this.

Chapter 12

Cam and Alice sit underneath the canal bridge, watching the reflections of sunlight ripple across the old arched brick. It’s a bit of a scramble to get from the tow path, up and over the bridge, and down to where they’re sat, but they’ve done it dozens of times. It’s a safe place to come, to get away from everything else, and nobody else seems to come here.

Miserably, Cam tosses a piece of stone into the murky water, where it sinks and vanishes without a trace. Rings spread out from where it hit the surface of the canal, reflecting in the light moving overhead.

“It’ll be okay,” Alice reassures him, putting an arm around his shoulders. “Nobody thinks it was you.”

He can’t find the strength to reply. Somehow, it was him. And it doesn’t matter that Danny deserved it, or that he wasn’t seriously hurt—probably, he reminds himself, remembering the amount of blood—none of it matters, because it was his fault. Mrs Jenkins and Mr Barker might believe him, but he’s not sure he even believes himself. Danny’s right: he’s going to get expelled, sued, and probably sent to one of those schools which are half-prisons for juvenile delinquents, where he’ll get bullied even more.

And then there’s the unexplained mystery of Loman, who’d been strangely quiet as they walked away from Highgrove. Once they came to the junction with the main road, he made vague excuses to leave. There’s something decidedly weird going on there, Cam thinks, staring at the dark water. It was Loman’s origami, after all.

In case of emergencies, his new friend had said.

“I’m not going to school tomorrow,” Cam mutters. “I’m going to be sick.”

“Maybe you got a gift of premonition,” Alice says. “That’d come in handy for tests.”

He snorts a half-laugh in response. “So I can see how badly I fail?”

She elbows him in the ribs. “You’re not half as stupid as you pretend to be. Even I know that.”

Even though her words prompt actual laughter, part of Cam’s brain stops and contemplates her suggestion. Could that be his gift? Premonitions? He tries to imagine what tomorrow will hold, but only comes up with a string of catastrophic disasters. As for Friday, which features their ill-fated class trip to the Science and Media Museum... well, he doesn’t need to be a psychic fortune teller to predict how well it will go.

“You’re thinking again, aren’t you?” Alice accuses him. “Cut it out. Thinking and you always ends badly. Why don’t you talk to Frankie again?”

The annoying thing is, he can’t exactly say she’s wrong. He does think too much, and it’s never a good idea. He just finds it so difficult to stop the thoughts once they arrive. They spiral around inside and nudge other ideas into being, which worm their way into his core until he’s sure he’s made of bad ideas and worries, and there’s no room left for anything else.

“What if it was me?” he whispers, not able to look his friend in the eyes. “What if I wanted to hurt Danny and, I don’t know... made it happen, somehow?”

Alice shrugs. “What if you did? He deserved it—and more! He’s been making your life horrible for ages.” She calls Danny several rude names Cam would get grounded for even thinking.

“I don’t want to be that person,” Cam picks around in the dirt for another stone to pitch into the canal. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Alice fiddles with the purple and blue ends of her long hair, twirling them around her fingers. “Sometimes, it’s the only language they can understand,” she says, quietly.

There’s not much he can say in response, so he passes her the stone he’d been about to throw.

She accepts it and chucks it, hard enough for it to bounce off the side of the canal before ricocheting back and landing with a loud plop in the water.

“Come on,” Alice says, picking up her bag. “We should go. My mum’s home, and I don’t want to be late.”

––––––––

IT’S ONLY WHEN HE’S lying in bed that Cam allows himself time to think again. It might be an awful idea—and Alice is rarely wrong—but there are too many things taking up space in his head to allow him to sleep. He takes a notepad and pen and lists off all the things worrying him.

SCHOOL!!!!!

Loman (so much weird)

Alice (how can I help?)

The Book (aaarrrgh)

The Gift???!?

Ravens, teleporting teachers, etc

Orange jumpers

He pauses after writing the last item on his list, then scrambles out of bed, clicking on the light. Rummaging through his bag, he finds what he’s looking for. The essay he’d written. And there, right at the end, is what’s been niggling away at the edges of his thoughts all day:

I wish all the staff had to wear identical clothes, just for one day.

Cam stares at his own writing for a few uncertain, panicky heartbeats. A loud buzzing fills his ears. His stunned confusion is eventually broken by a knock on his door.

“It’s well past bedtime!” Mum calls through. “Lights out.”

Hastily, he shoves the essay back into his bag. “Sorry, Mum. I was finishing something for school.”

The door opens a fraction and Mum’s head peers in. “Come on, sweetheart. Time for bed. You’ll be exhausted tomorrow, otherwise.”

He gestures at his pyjamas. “All ready for bed, see? I just remembered something I had to do.”

Mum gives him A Look he recognises, and he hurriedly scrambles back into bed. She smiles. “Night night, Cam. Sleep well, love.”

“Night, Mum.”

After she’s turned out the light, and he’s lying in the grey gloom of his room, Cam stares sleepily up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling. He’d been fascinated by space when they’d studied it at primary school and insisted on trying to recreate the universe in his small room. Even when the clouds cover the real things, he’s got his ceiling constellations.

“How was it me?” he whispers to the stars. “How did I do that?”

The stars don’t answer, and Cam falls asleep. He dreams of books full of the night sky, of words clustering around his head in a halo of letters, and of coal-black ravens appearing at every window.

“Don’t trust Loman,” one of the ravens croaks, stretching its huge wings until their darkness is everywhere around him and he’s smothered in black feathers. The rasping voice continues, “Don’t trust the trickster.”

Chapter 13

Cam wakes on Thursday with a headache and a foul temper. He stomps around the house, slamming doors until Frankie pulls him to one side in the kitchen.

“Cut it out,” she says, sharply. “I know things are difficult for you right now, but...” She pauses, frowns. “You didn’t say if our plan worked. It didn’t work, did it?”

He shakes his head. “No. And I’ll be late.”

Frankie brushes his protest to one side. “I’ll give you a lift. And Alice, too,” she adds, as he opens his mouth to ask. “Now, come on. We don’t have much time. Talk to me.”

Defeated, he slumps against the cupboards. “It didn’t work. I fed him the cookies, he thought they were delicious. Nothing weird happened until English.” He tells her about the raven, and about Loman’s removal of the bird from their classroom.

A thoughtful expression crosses her face. “I wonder which one it was,” she muses.

“You think it was one of Odin’s ravens? Is that possible?”

“Maybe. Many things are possible. But other things happened yesterday, didn’t they?” She sits on the bar stool and looks at him sharply. “I can tell, Cam. I can sense it around you. What happened after the raven?”

So, reluctantly, Cam explains about Danny and the paper shuriken, and his visit to Mrs Jenkins’s office. “You can’t tell Mum,” he finishes, as Frankie’s thoughtfulness threatens to turn into a frown. “I can’t have her running in there and shouting at people. I... I can’t. I’ll figure something out.”

She doesn’t look convinced but nods anyway. “Okay. Let’s get you to school. Alice meeting you by the bridge?”

Relieved at the change of subject, Cam grabs his jacket and bag. “Yeah. Thanks for the lift.”

––––––––

MATHS FIRST PERIOD brings Cam’s headache and sour mood back with a vengeance. Danny, sitting behind him, has his long legs stretched out and kicks Cam’s chair whenever the teacher isn’t looking. Which is roughly once a minute, given she’s at the front of the class and launching into a monologue about the magic of triangles. Again.

“So, Pythagoras theorised...”

With a theatrical sigh, Loman leans back in his chair and plonks his trainers on the table. “Crikey, this is even more boring than it was listening to the original Greek nerds,” he yawns. “Wanna get out of here?”

Cam is torn between staring at Loman and glancing in horrified fascination towards Mrs Walker, waiting to see when she notices what’s happening. To his immense confusion and surprise, the teacher continues as if nothing out of the ordinary is going on, and the rest of the class either don’t see Loman or ignore him.

Loman, meanwhile, stretches his arms high above his head and groans. “Come on, I’m bored.” He swings his feet off the table and saunters out of the room, past Mrs Walker, who seems to have been struck temporarily blind and deaf—at least where Loman is concerned. He even stops next to her and waves a hand in front of her face, which she entirely fails to notice.

The boy stops in the doorway and beckons to Cam. “Are you coming?”

Cam shoots a terrified look at the teacher, who continues waffling on about the wonders of triangles.

Loman dismisses her with a wave of his hand. “Oh, ignore her. She won’t even notice you’re gone. Neither will anyone else. Now—get a move on!”

Expecting Mrs Walker to shout his name at any moment, Cam guiltily stands and tiptoes to the doorway. He might as well have been a ghost for all the impact his movement has on the class. Loman shakes his head as Cam draws closer.

“I told you, they won’t notice you. We’ll be back by the end of the lesson. Probably.”

The corridors are strangely empty and quiet, filled with the gentle murmur of muffled lessons taking place behind closed doors instead of the chaos Cam’s used to. Anxiety gnaws away inside his stomach as he follows Loman down the stairs. He’s not supposed to be here.

“What if someone else comes?”

Loman shrugs. “What if they do? They won’t notice us. Come on, Cam, even you’ve got to admit that lesson was mind-numbingly dull. When are you ever going to need to know about calculating angles in triangles? Why else would you want me here, if not to save you from terminal boredom?”

He flings the door to the outside open, letting in a draft of cold air with an unhealthy helping of drizzle.

“Wait, I—what? What do you mean?” Cam hurries to catch up with his friend, his concerns and anxieties briefly pushed to one side by baffled bewilderment.

“Well, you did practically call me into existence,” Loman says, turning round and throwing his arms wide. “Ta-dah! Here I am!”

“Who are you?”

Loman grins. “I’m Loki, duh. You summoned me.”

“I did WHAT?!” Cam stares at the boy in horror.

“You wrote down your wish, and here I am.” Loman bows low and mockingly. “Don’t believe me?” He snaps his finger and thumb, and a notepad appears in his hand. Cam’s notepad. Loman—or Loki—flicks through the pages of doodles and scribbled notes before he lands upon the one he wants and turns the pad towards Cam. “Here.”

There, in his own handwriting, it says: I wish Loki came to this school.

A chill of recognition shivers through Cam at the sight. “But... but I crossed it out. I cancelled it.”

Loki—or Loman—shrugs his shoulders and tosses the notepad over his shoulder into the air behind him, where it promptly vanishes back to wherever it had come from. “Doesn’t matter. You called; I came.”

The Gift. Libris Sapientia gave him the gift of being able to summon through written words.

Cam’s legs wobble, and he finds himself sitting on the wet path rather suddenly.

Loki crouches before him, a mischievous expression on his face. Rainwater drips from his golden curls. “And now you know all about me, we can have even more fun. With your power and mine, we could rule.”

Cam can’t take his eyes away from Loki’s vivid blue gaze. “The school?”

The boy-god laughs. “The school, the country... who cares? We can take charge. Put those idiots in their rightful places.”

“I... I can’t, what if...”

Loki shrugs. “What if, why, whatever. Doesn’t matter. If it’s broken, we can fix it. That bully of yours? We could start with him. Can you summon mortals?”

Cam gives up on sitting in the puddle and lies down, gazing at the clouds and letting the rain mist over his face. Can he summon mortals? He has no idea. Until thirty seconds ago, he didn’t know he could summon anything. Now, here he is, lying on his back in an empty playground, with the Norse trickster god pretending to be his best friend and suggesting they take over the country. He’s twelve! He can barely manage to organise his homework, let alone anything more complex.

“Come on.” Loki stands, holding out a hand to Cam.

The universe provides no alternative options, despite Cam’s fervent prayers to any deity who might be listening—any deity other than Loki, that is. He sighs and takes Loki’s hand.

The trickster’s grin widens like a wolf’s as he hauls Cam upright. “Excellent! Let’s go find out what you can do.”

––––––––

THEY SIT IN THE SPACE between the bike sheds and the side of the sports hall, sheltered from the rain, and Loki hands him a pen and a pad of paper. “Start small,” he says.

Cam stares at the blank sheet of paper and forgets everything he’s ever known about writing. He’s not even sure he’s holding the pen correctly at this point.

Loki yawns and leans back against the wall, tucking his hands behind his head. “I’m hungry,” he says. “How about some food?”

Cam’s stomach growls at the concept. “Okay.” He takes a deep breath and writes:

I wish I had a box of doughnuts.

There’s a thump beside him, and a box of twelve doughnuts, glistening with icing and powdered sugar, appears out of nowhere.

Loki immediately opens the box and stuffs half a doughnut into his mouth. “Mmm...” he says, giving Cam a thumbs up and taking a second one.

Despite the little voice shouting at him that this is a Bad Idea, Cam helps himself to a glazed ring doughnut and munches his way through it. It tastes delicious and just like the real thing.

“Are they real?” he asks, a little indistinctly through a mouthful of doughnut.

Loki nods. “Seem to be. Bonus points for style, too, Cam. Good choice.”

“But where—I mean, how did they get here?” A thought occurs to him. “I didn’t steal them, did I?”

“Possibly,” Loki shrugs and grins. “On the plus side, though, no-one’s ever going to know it was you.”

“I’m not sure if—” Cam begins, but Loki waves a hand.

“Doesn’t matter. We’ve got more interesting things to think about! Like, how can we liven this place up? It’s like you got Hel in as your interior decorator—what’s with all the grey and beige? Honestly! And paths for walking? Steps? Where’s the zip lines and teleporters? Now we’re talking...”

Cam blinks as Loki continues waffling on about portals and hot spring swimming pools and dungeons for misbehaving students. Something the trickster said has stirred a memory.

“You said teleporters,” he interrupts. “Is that how Mr Barker got from the music block to the main block so quickly?”

Loki throws his head back and laughs. “No! That was me. Well, an illusion of mine to look like him. Pretty good, huh?”

“No! I mean, yes, it was good, but—oh, I’m gonna get in sooo much trouble for this. What if someone finds out?”

At that instant, footsteps come marching towards them on the wet tarmac, and a voice shouts, “Cameron McLoughlin!”

Cringing, Cam swivels round to come face to face with Mrs Jenkins. Well, his day has gone from terrible to catastrophic in the space of half a doughnut. Wonderful.

Chapter 14

Mrs Jenkins’s face matches her fuchsia cardigan and her eyes bore into Cam’s skull. “What in the name of—why are you out here? Eating doughnuts? Skipping lessons? I expect better from you.”

Cam wishes he could summon a doorway to another dimension. Then it occurs to him that maybe he could, and what such a dimension might be like, and how much more trouble he would be in, and—

And Mrs Jenkins is dancing. She puts her hands on her hips and bends her knees in time to a hidden music, then wiggles her whole body.

“I—” Cam doesn’t know where to look until he hears muffled snorts and turns to Loki.

The blonde boy catches his gaze and bursts into howls of laughter. Mrs Jenkins vanishes like a popped bubble, leaving behind nothing but an empty, wet playground.

“See?!” Loki says, still laughing. “So useful! Imagine how much more amusing assemblies would be with my version of Mrs Jenkins up there.”

Cam’s having trouble breathing, and his heart is going so fast he’s sure it’s audible to anyone within a fifty-foot radius.

“Come on.” Loki gets to his feet. “I think it’s time we broke out of this hole and had some fun. I’ve had enough formal education for a hundred lifetimes—I don’t need to do any more of it today.”

“I can’t skip school!” The reaction is instinctive. It doesn’t matter how many times he’s wished he could be elsewhere; he can’t imagine actually doing it.

Loki shrugs. “Sure you can. Like, what’re you going to miss? A bit of maths you’ll never use again? Time with the bunch of trend-following sheep who don’t see you for who you really are? Come on, Cam, you’re so much better than them. You’re better than this.”

“Alice isn’t sheep,” Cam mutters, but he can’t help sort of agreeing with the trickster’s points.

“We could go and get her as well, if you like?” Loki offers generously. “I’ll admit, she’s interesting, too. Reminds me of the Valkyries.”

Cam’s heard of the Valkyries in Norse myths: fierce women who chose which warriors died in battle and which survived. The fallen were escorted to Valhalla as their reward. Personally, he can better imagine Alice in the role of warrior.

“Where is she?” Loki asks. “She wasn’t in maths.”

“She’s with Mrs Winters,” Cam says. “The school counsellor.”

Grabbing a third doughnut, Loki gestures to Cam. “Lead on, then. Let’s go rescue our fair maiden.”

Cam considers this statement as he begrudgingly leads Loki across campus towards the counsellor’s office. Alice would probably take offence at being called a ‘fair maiden’, he thinks. He finds himself wondering what Alice will do to Loki when she finds out who he really is. Probably something along the lines of why she’s seeing Mrs Winters to begin with.

It doesn’t take long to reach the counsellor’s office, which is nerve-wrackingly close to the main staff room. Cam inches along the corridor with his heart in his mouth, expecting to hear his name be yelled at any moment. Loki, on the other hand, is apparently oblivious to the danger. He flings the door to the counsellor’s office open with melodramatic flair and announces,

“We’ve come to rescue you!”

Alice, who is sat opposite Mrs Winters, jerks around, her eyes wide and stunned. The counsellor, a curvaceous woman in her mid-forties, jumps to her feet. Her pleasant expression sours as she takes in Loki beaming in the doorway and Cam cowering behind, trying to look as invisible as is humanly possible.

“This is a private session,” she says curtly. “If you need to talk to me, please wait outside.”

“Nah, you’re all right,” says Loki with a dismissive wave of his hand. “We’ve just come for Alice.”

She blinks at him, clearly confused. “I’m sorry?”

Loki enunciates his words clearly and slowly. “We are taking Alice. She is coming with us.”

Cam glances down, but the floor seems annoyingly firm and unlikely to open up with a gaping chasm that will swallow him whole. He clutches at the door frame with sweaty palms.

“Cam?” Alice stands, pushing the comfy chair back. “What’s going on?”

He manages to find his voice, which comes out in a nervous whisper. “I’ll explain when we’re outside. Can you come?”

Clearly out of anything resembling patience, Loki barges into the small room and smiles his shark smile at Mrs Winters. “Of course she can come,” he says, and his voice sounds like warm honey.

“Of course she can come,” says Mrs Winters, her expression smoothing from irritated to pleasant. “Not to worry, Alice. Come back next week, our usual time.”

Alice looks from the counsellor to Cam and back again, then shrugs. “Okay. See you then.” She picks up her coat and bag from the floor beside the chair and pushes past Loki into the hallway, where she pauses next to Cam. “What’s going on?”

“Er,” says Cam, as Loki waltzes past them both.

“Come on!” the trickster god says, breaking into a full sprint along the corridor towards the outside. Cam and Alice exchange a look, then follow.

––––––––

“YOU’RE BOTH NUTS,” Alice says, after Cam’s finished his halting explanation of what’s going on. “Absolutely barking. And trust me, as a diagnosed mad person, I’m allowed to say that.”

They’re sat on the back of a bench, feet on the seat, in one of the local parks near the high school. Despite the two boys being in the dark green Highgrove uniform, not one single adult has questioned them about their truancy. Alice jumps off and glares at Loki as if she’s planning on single-handedly reducing him to a pile of ash with her stare.

He cheerfully grins back at her. “I like you,” he says. “You’re fun. I think you’d get on with Freya.”

“You’re certifiable,” she says bluntly. “And you!” She rounds on Cam. “This is crazy even for you. Does your mum know? Or Frankie?”

Cam resists the urge to roll his eyes at her. “No, I said so. I only just found out. Um.”

“Norse gods aren’t real!” she says. “Sure, magic I can accept. That’s fine. But gods aren’t real.”

Loki holds up a hand and opens his mouth to speak.

“Don’t start,” Alice says, not taking her eyes off Cam.

Loki closes his mouth again.

“Now—are you seriously saying your gift enables you to bring fairy tales—”

“Myths,” says Loki, looking affronted.

“Whatever. Myths. Fairy tales. You can bring these to life?”

Now that’s a terrifying thought Cam hadn’t even considered until this moment. Could he bring anything or anyone into this world, including fictional characters? Or do the things and people he summons have to be real to begin with? And if that’s the case, which figures in the myths and legends are real, like Loki, and which might be made up?

“Um,” he says again.

“Okay,” she says, pulling her bag round in front of her and dragging out a torn scrap of paper and a leaky biro. “Prove it.”

With shaking hands, Cam takes the pen and paper. “Why don’t you believe me?” he asks. “You know what my mum can do. What Frankie can do. Why’s this any different?”

Alice’s furious expression falters. “Because... if you can do this, you can change things. Make a difference—for yourself, for others. It’s big, Cam. It’s really big. And I’m not sure I’m ready to believe in that yet.”

He nods. “We’ll start small.” And we’ll ignore the Norse god sitting next to me, he thinks. Loki is watching the whole exchange with an unreadable expression on his face.

Resting the piece of paper on his knees, Cam writes in rather wobbly handwriting. As he finishes the final word, the smell of hot vinegar hits his nostrils, and he looks up from the paper to see a pile of chips, steaming in the autumn air. They are, however, not in a bag or a tray or anything else, and a good handful have already fallen through the wooden slats of the bench.

“Chips?” Alice’s eyes widen.

Cam grins. “Hungry?”

He doesn’t need to ask twice. All three of them tuck into the piping hot chips on the top of the pile. They’re drenched in strong vinegar and a good sprinkle of salt, and taste delicious. It might be a bit bizarre, eating chips off a park bench—especially when those chips appeared out of thin air and might, or might not, have been stolen from a chippy somewhere—but Cam’s stomach is growling, and he doesn’t stop to think too much about the weirdness.

Alice wipes greasy fingers off on the bottom of her hoodie and turns to Cam, her eyes sparkling with possibilities. “So, what else can you do?”

Chapter 15

“Someone’s going to notice we’re missing.” Cam wishes he didn’t worry about that sort of thing. Alice and Loman—it’s hard not to think of him as Loman, despite everything—clearly aren’t bothered by skipping school. Not that he’d expect a Norse god to worry about missing a day of 21st century education. And Alice spends more time having Important Conversations with grown-ups at school than she does in lessons these days. So maybe it is just him.

Loman—Loki—shakes his head. “Nope. Got that one covered. You’re currently sitting in...” He checks the latest model of iPhone, shining in a bright, silver case. Cam doesn’t even bother to ask where that came from. “Sorry, currently bored to death in design tech. I think they’re doing some form of woodwork. It’s okay; you’re not going to do anything stupid.”

“Makes a nice change,” says Alice, twirling a length of multi-coloured hair between her fingertips.

“Wait,” says Cam. “Hold on. I’m in the lesson?”

“Well...” Loki shrugs. “Sort of. Nobody’s noticed you’re not there, put it that way. Either of you. Or me, come to think of it. It’s okay; you’re not going to get in trouble. Not for that, at any rate. And Alice is... well, she’s around somewhere. Nobody’s going to realise she’s not anywhere in school, either.”

Cam opens his mouth, then shuts it again. It’s hard to ignore the looming sense of guilt growing like a shadow around him, but he tries to smile for Alice’s sake.

“Right...” Alice has been making notes in the back of an exercise book. Her handwriting loops in an illegible purple scrawl across the page, but Cam’s spent years learning to decipher it, even when it looks like it’s been written by about five different people. What he can make out, reading sideways, is that Alice seems to be Making Plans. This doesn’t bode well.

“We’ve started small,” Alice says. “So let’s think a little bigger. Can you summon living things? Apart from Norse gods, I mean,” she adds, glancing at Loki. Loki beams.

“Like what?” Cam asks.

She shrugs. “A frog? A kitten? I don’t know. Something small for now—while a tiger roaming the neighbourhood would be entertaining, it might get noticed.”

“Okay.” Cam thinks for a moment, then writes on his scrap of paper.

There’s a faint mew from underneath the bench, and a wobbly-footed black kitten emerges, shaking bits of cold chips from its paws. It stops and looks up at the three teenagers, then mews again.

“Awwwwww!!” squeals Alice, flinging herself off the bench and scooping the kitten up into her arms. “She’s so tiny! I love her!”

She snuggles the bundle of jet-black fur, which squeaks in protest, then begins to purr like a motorbike.

Cam looks from his writing to the kitten in Alice’s arms, then at Loki. “I didn’t want to take someone else’s pet,” he explains, as Loki gives him a questioning look. “So I said it had to be homeless.”

“I think she’s hungry,” Alice says, as the tiny kitten begins to nibble at her fingers with enthusiasm. “Ouch! Yeah, definitely hungry.”

It feels like a bad idea before the words even leave his mouth, but Cam says it anyway. “Let’s take her to my house.”

“Why don’t we—you—summon up some cat food?” Alice suggests, not taking her eyes off her new friend.

“Because I don’t know what the side-effects are of me doing this,” says Cam, standing up and stuffing his scrap of paper into his pocket. “So before I get carried away calling all sorts of things and people, I want to try and find out a bit more.”

Alice finally tears her gaze from the purring furball and stares at Cam. “You’re not gonna talk to your mum, are you?”

Cam’s stomach lurches violently at the suggestion. “No! I mean, I want to try and do some research.”

Loki, meanwhile, hops off the back of the bench with all the energy of a toddler who’s eaten too much sugar. “Excellent!” he exclaims. “I’ve not been inside a witch’s house for nearly a century. This should be enlightening.”

Turning, Cam stares at the god. It’s hard to see past the school uniform to the trickster beneath, but there’s something in the boy’s eyes and at the edges of his smile that suggest all isn’t quite as normal as it appears on the surface.

“You can’t tell my mum or my aunt,” Cam says, flatly. “You just can’t.”

Loki’s gleeful expression widens. “What do you plan on doing to stop me?”

A thought occurs to Cam. “I’ll burn the notebook,” he says. “The one where I summoned you. Or, I’ll wish you back to where you came from.”

The blonde boy tilts his head to one side thoughtfully. “That could work,” he concedes. “Fine. I’ll keep our secret. For now.”

––––––––

AS THEY WALK UP THE road towards Cam’s house, he begins to question the sanity of his decision. Granted, nobody’s accused them of skipping school—in fact, barely anyone has even glanced at them, which convinces him Loki’s doing something. But what? It bothers him that they seem invisible to every passer-by.

He stops in front of the house and turns to Alice and Loki. “Okay, Mum’ll be at work, but Frankie will be home. She knows about the magic but not what I can do—yet.” His gaze hardens on Loki. “And my family don’t know you, or about you, and I want to keep it that way. So... both of you need to keep quiet about it all. Okay?” He surprises himself with how determined he sounds.

Alice is still snuggling the kitten, which appears to have gone to sleep in the giant front pocket of her hoodie. She nods, clearly too distracted by her furry companion.

Loki, on the other hand, perks up at the mention of Frankie. “Will there be more cookies?”

“Possibly.” He doesn’t mention he’s shared his previous suspicions about Loman with Frankie. At some point, he’ll need to have that conversation with her, but ‘whoops, I accidentally summoned one of the Norse gods’ is something he needs to work up to. Maybe in a decade or three.

He doesn’t even get as far as the front door before it swings open and Frankie is standing there, dressed in jeans and a gold and scarlet top, her forehead creased into a critical frown.

“It’s half an hour before school finishes,” she snaps. “This had better be a good one, Cameron.”

Cam wracks his brain, trying to remember the half-dozen excuses and reasons he’d managed to concoct on the walk from the park to here, but his skull is infuriatingly blank. And if Frankie’s using his full name, then he’s definitely in trouble.

His aunt drums her fingers on the doorframe. “I’m waiting.”

He’s not seen Frankie this angry since he broke one of her beloved glass ornaments five years ago. This is not an auspicious start to the afternoon.

“It’s my fault,” Alice says, stepping past Cam and standing between him and the furious Frankie. “We were doing D.T., and the teacher said something which reminded me of... well, things I don’t want to remember, really. And Cam suggested we went outside for some fresh air, and then there was this kitten, and I decided it wasn’t worth going back in for the rest of D.T.—I mean, when are we ever going to need to know how to make a wooden box, like, ever?” She holds out the now-sleepy black kitten as a peace offering. “Don’t be mad at Cam, he didn’t really get much of a say in things. Honestly. And we won’t do it again. Promise.”

Frankie softens from thunderous to merely irate as she takes in Alice’s apologetic expression and the limp bundle of fur in her outstretched hands. “That’s a very young kitten,” she says, with a hint of disapproval.

Cam heaves an inward sigh of relief. The worst of the storm has passed.

“And who’re you?” Frankie turns her attention to Loki, who’s stood behind Cam, being unusually quiet and unassuming.

“Loman Lykill,” he says politely. “I’ve just moved to the school.”

Frankie’s eyes flicker briefly to Cam, who gives the smallest shake of his head in response. She says nothing to him, simply smiles and nods at Loman. “Okay. Well, I’m sure cutting school in your first week isn’t going to win you any brownie points. Never mind. You’d all better come inside.”

Cam hangs back on the doorstep as Alice and Loman enter, then looks at Frankie. She raises her brows but keeps her voice to just above a whisper.

“That’s the kid?” she asks.

He nods.

“Well...” She glances over her shoulder to where Alice is showing Loman where to dump his shoes. “He’s not a witch, I can tell you that much.”

No kidding, thinks Cam, as he traipses inside. You have no idea.

Chapter 16

“So, your aunt’s a witch?” Loki is sat cross-legged on the floor of Cam’s cramped room, whilst Alice sprawls across Cam’s single cabin bed, all legs and elbows. The black kitten is curled up tightly in a ball of jet fur, snuggled into the hood of her jumper.

“Yup. Her and my mum both are.” Cam has the rickety old office chair beside the bed’s tiny desk, which is barely big enough for his laptop and a wobbling tower of books.

“And you only got your powers this week?”

Alice rolls her eyes. “He’s already said that. I’d have thought a literal god would be smarter.”

Loki sneers at her. “I’m not the one with teal hair. You look like a kelpie having a bad hair day.”

She pokes her tongue out at him in response. “I’d thump you, but I can’t be arsed to get down there. Cam, kick him for me?”

“I’m not kicking a Norse god,” Cam sighs. “Not even for you, Alice. Unless he deserves it,” he adds, glaring pointedly at Loki. “Now... I need to figure out what’s going on. The only way I’m going to be able to do that is by checking in Libris Sapientia. And the only way I’m going to get near it without Frankie wondering what’s going on, is for you two to create a distraction.”

A wide grin of understanding appears on Loki’s face.

“Not that big of a distraction. I need—I want my house still standing at the end of it.”

“How about a large wolf or two?” Loki asks, leaning back on his hands. “I could—”

“No wolves,” Cam states firmly. “Alice?”

After extracting the kitten from her hood, Alice sits up and swings her legs over the side of his bed, dangling mismatched socked feet next to his head. “Got it,” she says, jumping down to land with a thud beside Loki. “You, follow me.”

Loki blinks, then scrambles to his feet and trails after Alice.

If it was anyone else going off with the Norse god, Cam would have felt apprehensive about their chances. When it comes to Alice, though, she’s an unstoppable force of nature. He doubts Odin himself would be able to slow her if she had her mind set on something.

When he can hear voices coming from downstairs, Cam sneaks out of his room and creeps up to his mum’s bedroom.

Heart pounding in his throat, Cam pushes open the door, which whispers on the thick carpet. “The book is mine, too,” he breathes, as he tiptoes across the plush flooring and kneels beside the bed. At any moment, Mum could step out of the shadows and catch him in here.

“I’m allowed to look at it,” he reassures himself as he reaches underneath the bed. The book is wrapped in a heavy silk fabric, soft and rich to the touch beneath his trembling fingers.

He’s going to get caught.

He’ll get caught and grounded, and by the time he’s allowed out again, people will be living on Mars.

A crash of broken glass comes from the sitting room and Cam freezes, the book halfway out from its home under the bed. What on earth are Loki and Alice doing? He closes his eyes and listens for Frankie’s shouts or screams.

Instead, peals of laughter reverberate up the stairs.

Grabbing Libris Sapientia, silk wrappings and all, Cam hurries out of his mum’s bedroom, closing the door behind him.

Abandoning the book in his room, tucked away in a corner, Cam races downstairs. He doesn’t know what he expects to find, but it certainly isn’t Frankie standing on the back of the sofa, trying to coax a terrified Dorian from the top of the curtain rail. The grey cat’s fur is sticking up on all ends like a bog brush, his ears are back, and he’s making a terrified yowling sound. Frankie, meanwhile, is making soft gentle noises and attempting—without success—to lure Dorian from his precarious perch.

A broken vase from the mantelpiece, its flowers and water strewn across the floor, is clearly the cause of the earlier crash.

The reason for this chaos and destruction is, apparently, the black kitten, which is clinging to Alice’s shoulder with all of its claws. Its tail is stuck up in the air, and its tiny hackles are raised in a fluffy arch of defiance.

Cam stops in the doorway and stares at the mayhem. Alice, Loman and Frankie are all in various stages of giggles.

“She’s the size of your head,” Frankie chides Dorian, laughing. “You absolute wuss.”

The grey cat wails again and shuffles further along the curtain rail, wobbling precariously.

Alice glances at Cam, her brows going up in a silent question. He nods.

“I... I think maybe we’d better go,” Alice says. “We’ll take the terror kitten with us. Come on, Loman.”

It’s only when Alice and Loman have said their hasty goodbyes and left, with the apparently petrifying kitten, that Frankie finally manages to disengage Dorian’s claws from the curtains and haul him back down to ground level. He immediately buries himself into her lap, making his unhappiness audibly known.

“I know,” Frankie murmurs, stroking him gently. “I know. It’s your house.”

Cam makes himself useful by picking up the broken glass and flowers and mopping up the spilled water from the floor. A guilty niggle worries away inside his belly the whole time. Eventually, he makes his excuses and heads back upstairs before Mum comes home.

––––––––

IN FILMS AND TV, CAM thinks, characters wedge a chair or something under the door handle to stop anyone else from coming in. When your mum can move through the shadows, though, that’s not exactly helpful. If she wants to come into his room, there’s nothing he can do to stop her. Although, thankfully, she’s pretty good at respecting his space, so she wouldn’t come in without a good reason.

Like her precious book going missing, for example.

Cam settles for sitting on his bed, with a blanket ready to throw over the book at a second’s notice, and mentally crossing his fingers. Now he’s on his own, he needs to figure out what’s going on. The book feels almost alive to the touch once he’s unwrapped its covering. There’s a tingle, like the static electricity after rubbing his trainers on cheap carpet. But it doesn’t feel dangerous.

Holding his breath, he opens the book.

To his surprise, there are no lightning bolts, no ominous howls, and the sky outside doesn’t darken. To be fair, given the rain pelting against his window, the only way it could get much darker would be if the sun set a couple of hours early.

Flicking on the reading light above the bed, he pulls the quilt around his shoulders and begins.

Libris Sapientia has been something Cam’s avoided for years, ever since he knew it was going to change his life. If he ignored it and pretended it didn’t exist, everything would stay the same, and he could continue trying his best to be invisible and unremarkable. But now... now everything is different, and he can’t ignore the book and what it contains anymore.

Cam’s not sure what he expects to find within the book—the only glimpses he’s had over the years have shown him very little. He turns the pages, skimming their contents, which is mostly acres of cramped, spidery writing, the paper browned with age. Fingerprints war with tea-stains and doodles for space on the pages. Every now and then is a sketch of something strange and unsettling, annotated with a range of notes in different handwriting. He stops on one, a creature with eyes too big and ears too pointed. Beside it, written in neat black lettering, is a short description.

Brownie (auxilium parvus). Common house spirit. Likes cream, only comes out at night. Generally found in pairs and tend to be very shy. Helpful if treated kindly.

Beneath this was a large splotch of blue ink, and a hastily scrawled note in pencil.

Can be a right royal pain if not treated well. Don’t forget the cream!

Cam wonders what the brownie does if it’s not fed cream. After looking at the sharp claws and teeth, he decides he’d rather not find out.

The next page holds a recipe for a potion to remove stubborn stains; the page after is a summoning spell for lost items. There are more spells, more incantations, interspersed with memorial pages for previous family members, and notes about powers. Some of these, like control over particular elements, or telepathy, seem more useful than others. Then, Cam turns the page to find one titled Shadow Shifters.

That’s Mum’s power, her gift from the book. Pulling the blanket tighter around his shoulders, Cam reads. It’s mostly things he already knows, stuff Mum’s told him over the years about moving through the shadows. Dire warnings not to linger in the dark space between, with fading annotations in the margins about yet another witch who’d failed to return to the daylight realm in time. Cam shudders and glances at the darkening corners of his room. Mum’s fine, he thinks. She knows what she’s doing.

The second half of the page is a different story altogether. Before he’s less than half a sentence in, he’s biting his lip and holding his breath. There must be a mistake. This isn’t what his mum can do. It can’t be.

The darkest, most dangerous, aspect to a Shadow-Shifter’s powers lies in their ability to converse with the dead or dying. As souls move on through the void beyond our world to their next destination, a Shadow-Shifter’s role can involve guiding—or even helping—those souls in need of it. The risks are great, and depend on the soul of the departed, but first and foremost is, of course, that the soul can trap the witch for long enough that they are both—

Cam slams the book shut. His hands tremble.

Mum can talk to the dead?

Chapter 17

It takes a long time for Cam to get his breathing and pulse back to something resembling normal. All the while, the book sits in front of him on the bed, silent. But he can swear it’s talking to him, whispering its secrets. Keep reading, it seems to be saying. Find out more. What’s the worst that could happen?

“I don’t want to know anything else,” Cam mutters. He ties the book up in its silk wrappings and climbs down from the bed, tucking it under one arm. He’s in the doorway when he hears the front door open and mum come home.

His heart doubles its pounding rhythm and he shuts the bedroom door, glancing around for a place to hide the book. The stairs creak—someone, probably Mum, is coming up them.

Desperately, Cam shoves the book back onto his bed underneath the rumpled duvet and blankets, then throws himself onto the carpet with the nearest book as there’s a knock on his door.

Mum opens it a crack and pokes her head in. “Hi sweetheart, I’m home. How was your day?”

Oh, thinks Cam, the usual. Discovered I’ve accidentally summoned a Norse god, left school early, and stole the family heirloom. And, apparently, you spend your spare time chatting with the dead. Nothing much.

He shrugs. “So-so,” he says, hoping Frankie’s kept to her word and not mentioned his unplanned arrival home. His voice sounds remarkably calm for how shaky his breathing is.

“We’re going to order Chinese for dinner. How’s the homework situation?”

Cam smiles. The silver lining to skipping out of school early is that he has no idea if there was any homework for maths or design tech, and there was nothing set for the other four lessons today. “I’ve done everything I’ve been given,” he says, truthfully. “All good.”

She beams at him, and a pang of guilt shoots through him at her happiness. “That’s my smart boy. So, we’re going to do a take-away and board games evening. Would you like to join us?”

“I’ll be down in a minute,” he promises. “Just finishing this chapter.”

Mum nods and, a moment or two later, her footsteps head upstairs towards her room. He waits for the shout of discovery, of annoyance, but nothing happens. A few minutes later, he can hear her voice from downstairs, talking to Frankie. Mum must have shifted straight from her room—Frankie will be grumpy. There’s always a chance, though, that she’s asking Frankie if she’s moved Libris Sapientia, and then Frankie will deny doing so, and then...

Then, Cam will be in deep trouble.

He hesitates in his doorway, torn between the urge to run upstairs and shove the blasted book back under Mum’s bed, or to go down with his fingers crossed.

“Cam!” Mum calls. She doesn’t sound angry, although that’s no guarantee. “Are you coming? We’re going to order dinner.”

Cam throws a guilty glance at the lump of bedding, then makes up his mind. “Coming!” he calls, shutting his bedroom door. He can sort the book out later.

––––––––

AFTER DINNER, WHEN the three of them have eaten their body weight in stir-fried vegetables, duck spring rolls, sweet and sour noodles, and chicken fried rice, they relax around the table. Mum’s said nothing about the book, and Frankie’s said nothing about abandoning his education, so Cam’s finally allowing himself time to breathe.

“Monopoly?” Mum asks.

“Too long,” Frankie replies.

“And you cheat,” Cam says. “Twelve double sixes in a row isn’t good luck. It’s cheating.”

Frankie grins. “Skills.”

“Cards it is, then,” Mum fishes the pack out from the dresser drawer and deals for Crazy Eights, which is Cam’s favourite. As he discards his hand in turn, he starts to feel almost normal. This is fine. He can keep pretending everything’s back to how it should be, until it actually is.

“Who’s the Norse god of the dead?” he asks, as he puts the seven of hearts down.

“Hel,” Mum answers, without missing a beat, lays the seven of clubs. “Why?”

Cam hasn’t thought that far ahead. “Um,” he says, helpfully.

“You said you were doing some stuff on them at school,” Frankie interjects, picking up a card from the remainder of the deck.

He catches her eye gratefully. “Oh, yeah. We have to write a non-chronological report.” He lays the three of clubs, his heart thumping again. Why did he ask that? Does Loki know something about Mum’s special abilities?

Does Frankie know what Mum can do?

“Well, we’ve got plenty of books on the various deities,” Mum says. “Remind me when we’re done and I’ll go and see what I can find.”

“It’s okay,” he answers quickly—possibly too quickly, as Frankie gives him a sharp look. “I’ll look online tomorrow after school.”

“I thought you said you’d done your homework?” Mum asks.

Frankie is watching him with a thoughtful expression, her eyes narrowed, but she doesn’t drop him in it. Cam’s ridiculously relieved; he doesn’t think he could take anything more happening today. It’s taken everything he can muster to keep going, and now he’s simply looking forward to his bed and sleep. No more problems. Nothing more unusual or challenging. Tomorrow can bring its own issues without today borrowing them.

“Uh... this is extra. I’m just interested in something Mrs Abbott said the other day. She said we could do a bonus report on something... if we wanted to. Um.” His cheeks are hot with the lie, but Mum and Frankie don’t seem to notice.

The rest of the game passes in a blur. Mum wins, and Frankie accuses her of cheating, but it’s all the sort of family banter Cam’s used to. He takes part in the teasing, but his heart’s not in it. After a while, he takes himself off to bed.

Except, he can’t go to bed yet because the book is lurking under his blankets. Only now there’s a giant black bird standing on top of the pile of bedding, watching him with glittering eyes and a beak which looks sharp enough to do quite a bit of damage.

“Um,” says Cam, and shuts the door quietly behind himself. It seems his desire for sleep is going to have to wait a while longer.

The bird croaks and hops forward a few inches, shuffling its feathers.

“Are you the same one? The one who appeared in my English lesson?”

It hops forward again until it’s perched on the edge of his bed, massive wings spread wide, and it opens its beak again.

Hastily, Cam holds up his hands, palms out. “Ssshhhh!” he hisses. “You’ve got to stop that, seriously, or I will be in epic amounts of trouble.”

There’s a pause, while the bird ruffles its feathers for a moment, then the air around it shimmers like the surface of a lake, and Cam’s ears pop like the time he went in a plane. Instead of a raven sitting on his bed, there’s now a girl. Her skin is the colour of midnight and her hair, which is a mass of corkscrew curls, glimmers with iridescent hues. Black eyes—and Cam realises with a jolt of surprise they are entirely black, no whites at all—are watching him with the same curious expression as the raven’s.

“Um,” Cam says again, taking a step back until his spine is pressed against the wooden panels of his bedroom door.

“Cameron Darius McLoughlin?” she asks, quirking her head to one side.

Cam’s brain has stalled. He can only stare at the raven girl, who looks at him with jet black eyes and a resigned expression.

“Goodness, I knew human children could be difficult, but I expected at least some form of intelligent communication,” she huffs, hopping down from her perch and landing, eerily silent, on his bedroom floor. “Let’s take a proper look at you, Cameron.”

The girl steps over towards him and peers closely into his face. She has to bend a little as she’s several inches taller than him, although slightly shorter than Alice. Eventually, she shrugs. “Not quite what I was hoping for, but you’ll do.”

Cam’s voice comes out as an awed whisper. “Who are you?”

The movement of her head and her expression suggests she’s rolling her eyes at his question—although, given the darkness of her eyes, it’s hard to be sure.

“I’m Huginn,” she says. She pronounces it Hoo-gin, with a hard ‘g’.

Cam swallows the lump of worry crawling back up inside his throat. “Um,” he manages.

This time he’s one hundred percent sure she rolls her eyes at him.

“Do you say anything else?” she asks, stepping neatly over the piles of stuff dumped on his floor to sit on his desk chair. “I mean, I can read your mind, but I’d rather not if I don’t have to. Human thoughts are so... unpleasantly messy.”

“You can read minds?”

She stares at him. “Hello? Embodiment of thought, sitting in your bedroom? Of course I can read minds. It doesn’t mean I want to, though. This would all be much easier if you talked. Using your words,” she adds, as if that’s not obvious enough.

Taking a deep breath, Cam closes his eyes. When he opens them again, the raven girl is still on his chair. She’s dressed all in black, too. Black jeans, black boots, and a black top which somehow manages to look like a moonlit oil-slick. It reflects light he’s not entirely sure is coming from somewhere in his room.

“Okay, then,” he says, as she’s clearly not simply going to vanish if he wishes hard enough. “What do you want?”

Chapter 18

“I want to help you.” Huginn leans back in the chair, which creaks a little, and folds her arms.

“Help me with what?” Cam has lost track of how many things he needs help with.

“A great many things,” she says. “You have a gift, Cameron. A powerful ability, and it’s up to you to use it responsibly. Everything you do will have—”

“Consequences,” he finishes. “Yes, I know. I was trying to find out what those might be, and I found out my mum can talk to the dead. And...” he trails off, remembering what the Book had said about shifters being lost in the space between.

“Your mother will be safe,” Huginn says, and her voice is calm and soft. “Trust me, I know about these things.”

Cam frowns. “How do you know about them?” She doesn’t look more than maybe thirteen or fourteen at the most.

She smiles, a brilliant white flash of teeth and humour. “I’m a great deal older than I look in this form,” she says. “Centuries of experience.”

“But...”

“Loman Lykill is a twelve-year-old boy,” she says, matter-of-factly. “He’s also many centuries old. Appearance is not everything. The sooner you come to accept these things, the better. And he really shouldn’t be in your world, especially in his current form. Which is partly why I’m here.”

“You’re a consequence,” Cam realises, with a sinking feeling in his gut he’s becoming only too familiar with. “Of me summoning Loki.”

Huginn nods. “Well done. Took you long enough.”

“Was it you in the classroom?”

Another nod. “I’m sorry if I scared you.”

“I wasn’t scared,” Cam lies.

“Well, you certainly looked worried,” she says. “And you should be—Loki can do things you can’t even dream of. And now, as he has the impulse control of a twelve-year-old human... It’s going to get worse from here.”

Cam’s not sure what’s worse: a huge raven sitting on his bed, or a girl sat in his chair telling him things can only go more pear-shaped than they already have.

“Trust me,” Huginn sits up straight again. “This is only the beginning. With a power like yours, you could do anything. Which isn’t a good thing, I might add.”

Cam opens his door an inch and peeks out into the hallway. It’s dark, and he can hear Mum and Frankie chatting downstairs. He closes the door again. “Okay. Maybe you can help me. Is it real? The stuff I summon, I mean, is it real?”

The girl shrugs. “Define real.”

“I don’t know.” He waves his hands vaguely, gesturing at the contents of his room in an attempt to indicate realness. “Um. Stuff that exists before I write about it. The doughnuts—were those actual doughnuts? Did they come from somewhere, a shop? A bakery?”

“Let’s say yes, for the sake of your poor human brain,” she says. “And the kitten, it came from a dank alley, and the chips were from a chip-shop, and Loki... came from elsewhere.”

“And the orange jumpers? That wasn’t a thing I summoned. Not like the others. It was a wish, an event.”

“This is where we run into trickier ground. You summoned the idea in their heads. Which was, to use your limited terminology and understanding, real. Both the idea—and their minds.”

Cam’s heart misses a beat and makes up for lost time in the few seconds after. “Wait, what?”

“Which is going against that whole ‘free will’ malarkey, and then we start getting into even more problematic ground.” Huginn spins round on the chair and comes to face Cam once more, her dark eyes boring into him as if she can see into his soul. She probably can, he thinks. “To summarise, it’s a Really Bad Idea. Don’t do it again.”

“My head hurts.” Cam slumps against the door, sliding until his bottom hits the threadbare carpet. “What if I do it accidentally? Like, wish for everyone in my school to disappear, or something. Oh, God, did I just do that? Can I undo it if I did?”

She laughs, loud enough for Cam to wonder if Mum or Frankie can hear her. “You have to deliberately wish it and write it down. You can’t do it accidentally.”

“But the teachers dressed in orange... I didn’t mean—”

“You ate the cookies,” Huginn points out.

“I—oh. Frankie’s cookies?”

“Yup.”

“Oh. Oh.” He can practically hear the penny dropping. It’s raining pennies. Whole pounds-worth of them, thundering to the floor in his brain, creating coppery puddles. At this rate, he’s going to drown in pennies before he gets a chance to fix anything. He did magic because of the cookies. Huginn showed up, in bird form, after he’d eaten them. And he’d written his essay after eating them, fresh out of the oven, and not even realised he’d been doing magic.

The flood of understanding must show on his face, as Huginn grins at him. “Your aunt’s good at what she does,” she says. “Very good.”

“Unlike me. I’m sure she’s never messed up this badly before.”

Huginn’s grin turns slightly mischievous. “I can ask my sister,” she offers.

Cam dredges around in his memories. “Muninn?”

“I’m impressed, you do know your mythology.” She twists the seat from side to side, kicking her heels against the side of his desk. “Look, you’re starting out. All of this is fine. Muninn is... harder to get in touch with than I am, but if you need to see how your aunt and your mother got things wrong when their gifts were new, I’ll put in a word for you. However,” she spins around again before standing up and walking over to him. “We’ve got some things to fix.”

––––––––

IT TURNS OUT ONE OF the things Cam needs to fix is less to do with him, and more to do with Alice.

“She left here with Loman,” Huginn says as she opens his bedroom window. “We need to find her before she gets into trouble.”

Cam glances at the clock. “It’s after eight. And it’s dark. There’s no way I’ll be allowed out.” He’s also exhausted after the day’s revelations, but he’s not holding out much hope that Huginn will be sympathetic.

Huginn tilts her head in that slightly creepy bird manner and doesn’t blink.

“I can’t!” Cam insists. “Frankie already thinks I’m bunking off school and she’ll absolutely hit the roof if I sneak out at night as well.”

“Then you’ll have to be quiet, mortal boy,” she says, sitting on the windowsill and swinging her legs over and into the evening air. “Your friend’s life might well depend on it.”

That gets Cam’s attention. “How much danger is she in?” he asks, grabbing a jacket off the back of his door. There’s a cold, damp breeze blowing in through the open window, and he doesn’t know how long he’ll be out for.

Huginn shrugs. “She’s with the Norse god of chaos and mischief. She’s in as much trouble as she can imagine.”

If Cam can imagine a whole heap of trouble, Alice can imagine worse. With Loki to encourage her, he’s not sure he even wants to find out what they’ve been up to.

“Okay...” He pulls the coat on. “Hang on.” He rolls up some spare clothes and shoves them under his duvet, along with a pillow. Libris Sapientia, wrapped in its silk, goes into his chest of drawers, tucked under a crumpled mess of t-shirts. When he’s finished, it almost looks as if there’s someone curled up in the bed, asleep. It won’t hold up to much scrutiny, but it’s the best he can do. The thought briefly occurs to him that he could wish a clone into existence, but given the potential for disaster, pillows are probably the better option.

Huginn observes his meagre attempts at subterfuge with a curious expression, then drums her fingertips on the windowsill. “Are you quite finished?” she asks, a note of irritation creeping into her voice.

“Yes. Um. Yes, okay.” If he thinks about this too much, he’ll change his mind. And then Alice will be in trouble.

He slips on a pair of trainers, switches off the light, and joins Huginn by the window, where the chill evening air brings with it a damp scent of uncertain difficulties and dangers.

“How are we supposed to get down?” Cam’s bedroom’s on the first floor, and it’s an unhealthy drop from the window to the ground. Knowing his luck, he’d probably break an ankle if he tried jumping it.

Huginn stares at him with those unsettling black eyes. “We’re not going down,” she says. “We’re going up.” Then, she touches him lightly on the arm, and everything gets even stranger.

Chapter 19

Flying is significantly harder than Cam expected it would be. In his dreams, he floats above the earth, swooping and soaring, or bounding from rooftop to rooftop. In reality—if that’s what this could be called—he has to frantically flap his wings to keep himself from lurching into the nearest building or tree. It’s exhausting.

Meanwhile, Huginn drifts on silent wings, seemingly immune to gravity.

“Do you know where she is?” Cam wheezes, and his words come out in a cawing croak. The raven understands him, though, as she tilts her wings a fraction of an angle and drops until she’s close enough to touch feather tips to his.

She creaks a reply, which is translated from raven-speak to English in his avian brain. “I know where Loki is. I’m following him.”

Cam narrowly avoids a telephone pole and nearly collides with a tree as a result. He catches hold of a mostly-bare branch with his claws and holds on for dear life. Huginn settles, a little huffily, onto a branch a few feet away, shuffling her feathers until they’re smooth. Cam must look more like a scarecrow, he thinks; everything’s sticking out in the wrong directions, and gravity keeps threatening to pull him back down to the ground with a thud.

“You’re not very good at this,” Huginn says, and the air around her shimmers again until the girl sits on the branch above him. “Honestly, it’s not that difficult. I’m not asking you to do anything particularly challenging.” She reaches down to touch him.

Cam is stretched thin like a bubble, feathers melting away until he’s left fully human, sat on the terrifyingly narrow branch and clinging to it with his bare hands. Thankfully, his clothes seem to have come with him, which is at least something to be grateful for. He considers the ground, which seems a very long way away. “This is not an improvement!” he yelps, scrabbling around for a more solid branch to grip. His fingers close around one and he grabs it like a wooden lifeline.

The girl sighs and drops—without even checking where her feet are going to land—to stand beside him. “Goodness, you make such a fuss. We’ll do this your way, then. It’ll take a lot longer.”

Cam glares at her. “You couldn’t have turned me back when we were, y’know, on the ground?”

“You didn’t, y’know, land on the ground,” she points out. “You landed in a tree. This tree. Which, luckily for you, has lots of useful branches for you to be able to climb down. Come on. We’re wasting time.”

Gritting his teeth, Cam gingerly slips, slides, and scrambles his way to earth, astonishingly breaking no bones in the process. When his feet are finally back on terra firma, and his heart is threatening to break a rib with its frantic pounding, Huginn doesn’t hang about.

“Follow me,” she snaps. “I hope you’re better at running than you are at flying.”

She transforms back into her raven form and launches herself into the air at speed. Cam has about a second to kick his brain into gear, then runs after her. This, he can do. It’s like P.E. all over again, only this time it’s just him, and he doesn’t have to worry about upsetting anyone by doing better than he should, like beating any of the football bros. Out here, in the damp late evening, in the patchy orange and black streets, he’s on his own and can go as fast as his body will let him.

Which is actually pretty fast.

Last year, before he left primary school, his teacher said he should think seriously about running for the county team. He’d thought about it and had come to the decision that it would make him noticeable. And there were enough things in his life to draw attention, without being good at something. Being average was easiest.

Not that the past week has been particularly average, he thinks, as they turn a corner and head up the hill towards the church of St Andrew. A tangle of worry twists in Cam’s stomach as his feet pound on the wet pavement, and anxiety, rather than exertion, makes his heart quicken. Alice and Loki can’t be up to anything good in a graveyard, and there’s not many other places this road leads.

Huginn comes to a halt, landing on the steeply sloping roof of the gateway to the churchyard. The air around her flickers and she becomes a girl again, her black hair and skin gleaming in the blue-white light from a nearby security light. She slides down the shingles and lands silently on the path in front of the gate.

“Do you know what this is?” she asks as Cam draws nearer.

Cam’s feet want to keep on running, run past the church and up the hill, away from all of this. He forces them to a stop outside the gate and looks at Huginn. “What?”

She taps the thick wooden post. “This. Do you know what it’s called?”

He shrugs. “It’s a gate.”

The girl looks scornful. “It’s a lych-gate, or resurrection gate. They used to shelter corpses under it while they waited for the clergy, before burying them.”

Cam takes in the old wooden structure with a greater level of consideration. “Huh.” Now he’s even less keen to find out what awaits him in the graveyard.

With a grin, Huginn tilts her head, winks at him, then turns on her heel and strides through the open gate. Cam follows, trying not to think about the bodies which had waited in this space over the decades.

He trails after Huginn between the gravestones, carefully avoiding stepping on any of the grass in front of the stones. After a while, he hears hushed voices, the words muffled in the darkness. One of the voices raises into a disapproving snap, and he recognises it for Alice.

“That’s her,” he whispers to Huginn. The girl turns, a finger to her lips, and nods. She points to a large monument: a tall angel with ivy flowing where hair would be. It takes Cam a moment before he spots Alice and Loman crouched in the long grass at the foot of the angel.

As he watches, Alice gets to her feet. “No,” she says. “No, this doesn’t feel right. I’m going home.”

Loman—Loki, Cam corrects himself—catches her by the wrist and stands. He says something, too quietly for Cam to hear the words, and Alice shrugs, shaking his fingers from her arm.

“Fine. Whatever.” She sounds frustrated, tired, and ready to do the wrong thing if it will get her out of this situation.

Loki’s eyes gleam like fire in the darkness and he grins. “Yes! Oh, this is going to be so much fun. Now... where shall we start?”

Alice trails a finger across the angelic statue beside them. “Why not here?”

Cam can’t hear Loki’s response, but the Norse god hop-skips to another grave.

“How about this one, then?” He taps the stone, then jumps up to balance on top of it, holding his arms raised to the night air. “Your choice, Alice. Who do we bring back?”

Chapter 20

A cloak of chill dread settles across Cam’s shoulders, and he shakes it off with a conscious effort of will. Beside him, Huginn frowns.

“He can do that?” Cam whispers. “Raise the dead?”

Her frown deepens. “Apparently so. Nobody’s ready for Ragnarok yet.”

That is a word Cam recognises, and not just because of the movies. The Norse end of the world, an apocalyptic vision of how everything fell apart.

“A ship of dead men’s nails,” he mutters. “And an army of the dead.”

Huginn glances at him sharply. “They still tell those tales?”

Cam looks at his feet to avoid meeting her piercing gaze. “Not really. I... I like reading, okay?”

She turns back to where Loki is demonstrating his ability to jump from stone to stone, as if gravity is something which applies to other people. “Still, you’re not wrong. But I wish you were. Come on.”

The grass around the gravestones comes almost up to Cam’s knees, and the ground underfoot is soft and muddy from the drizzle. It’s not long before Cam’s trousers are soaked through. However, his mind whirs through so many other things, he doesn’t have time to worry about being wet. As Cam and Huginn draw closer, Loki catches sight of them and stops leaping across the graves. He stands, arms folded. Balancing on top of a tall stone means he’s more than twice Cam’s height, and Cam has to crane his neck just to look up at the other boy.

“What do you want?” Loki demands.

“Alice,” Cam says, trying to keep his voice calm. “That’s all.” Don’t antagonise the Norse god, he thinks. Get Alice, get out of here.

Loki’s disapproving gaze flicks to Huginn. “And you’ve brought the birdbrain with you. Wonderful.” He mutters something under his breath and jumps to land in front of Cam and Huginn.

“Why’d you bring her into this?” Loki glances up at the misty darkness overhead as if the sky can answer his question instead of Cam.

“She—” Cam begins, but Huginn steps forwards.

“I chose to come,” she says. “We’re worried about you, Loki. You don’t need to do this. Any of this. Come home and leave the mortals to their own problems.”

Loki laughs scornfully, and it sounds an awful lot older than the laugh which should come from a twelve-year-old’s throat. Cam wonders how he could ever have mistaken the boy for anything other than who he truly is.

With a glare that could melt solid granite, the god turns back to Cam. “Do you have any idea where I’ve been for the last umpteen centuries?”

Cam backs up against the nearest gravestone, which is chilly and damp against his spine. His fingers fumble around behind him, feeling weather-worn engravings and cold, wet moss. He can’t find any words to answer Loki’s question.

“No, of course you wouldn’t. Why would you?” The god throws his hands into the air and a wind whips through the trees around them, shaking loose a cascade of yellow and brown leaves. “You probably remember all those stories about golden apples and giants. Then that smugly perfect idiot had to go and spoil it all.”

Wracking his brains, Cam glances at Alice, who shrugs, wide-eyed and unsure. This is supposed to be his thing, all this random nerdy history and magic stuff, not hers. If he doesn’t remember it, how on Earth does he expect her to?

“Balder,” Loki snarls bitterly. “Ever-perfect, mummy’s boy Balder. Oh, the stories make out everyone loved him, and Frigg made everything promise never to harm him. Do you know how many bribes and deals she had to agree to? Ridiculous! And then that fool Höd went and listened to me for once in his miserable life, and then next thing I know, Balder’s dead and I’m being hunted for my life. Fun times up in Asgard!”

A memory from one of the books he’s read emerges from the panicked depths of Cam’s mind. “You were a prisoner,” he says, quietly. “There was a snake.”

Alice looks sharply at Cam, her expression clearly suggesting he’s gone crazy.

Loki doesn’t seem to notice. His eyes narrow, and the temperature plummets. Ice crystals glitter on the trees and ground, and Cam remembers what he’s read about Jotunheim and the frost giants. “Oh, there was a snake. Dripping its poison onto my face.” He grins his shark grin at Cam, although there’s no humour in his eyes. “Thanks to you, I got out of that. But now I’m like this,” he adds, gesturing at himself. “Better than nothing, I suppose. But I wouldn’t exactly choose to be this side of puberty again. Mortals get the rough end of the deal with so many things. All those hormones and urges and everything. And you had to summon me to your school as a pupil. I’m practically human.”

Cam swallows dry terror. His voice comes out as a hoarse whisper. “Couldn’t you... change yourself?” He’s read so many stories about Loki shapeshifting into a horse, a woman, a wolf.

Loki grimaces and makes a disgusted noise. “Not yet.”

Alice, meanwhile, has been listening to all of this with an increasing look of confusion overriding her previous uncertainty. Frowning, she puts a hand on her hip. “Oh, come on! Really? You’re throwing your toys out of your pram because someone did what you asked, and you asked them to do something really stupid? And then you got punished for it, so now you’re hacked off and going to take it out on people who have absolutely nothing to do with it, instead of having fun with us? You could do almost anything. Literally. Between you and Cam, you two could change the world—and I’m not talking about raising the dead or taking over—you could make a real difference. To people who would notice it. And then you wouldn’t get put back in front of a giant snake, and I might get to have—I mean, lots of people’s lives would be better. I thought you were better than that.”

She sounds like she’s about to cry, which alone makes Cam nervous. Alice never cries.

He looks from her to Loki, then back to his friend again. She’s biting her lower lip and glaring at them all, her hands balled into fists as if she expects to have to fight. He has no doubts whatsoever whether she would try.

Loki’s mouth pinches together, his eyes narrowed. He looks like he wants to blast Alice into orbit. For a moment, Cam wonders if that might be a risk, but then Loki shrugs.

“Whatever,” he sneers dismissively, and stalks away between the stones and into the dark night.

Huginn touches Cam on the shoulder. “Go on,” she whispers. “I believe in you.”

Cam turns sharply to stare at the raven girl. “What? Why me?”

She smiles. “Because you can change things. You can convince him to come home. And,” she adds, “you can send him out of this reality if you need to.”

His eyes widen. “How? I don’t have the notebook. I could try summoning it, but I’m not sure where it is... if it’s even in our world any more. Loki had it, when we were on the playground earlier. Then, it was gone. Vanished into nothing. It’s probably floating around in some nameless void somewhere, and I haven’t—”

Huginn puts a finger to her lips, and Cam stops speaking. She smiles, then opens her mouth and makes a strange calling sound. It reminds Cam of the noises the raven made in his bedroom, and he’s about to ask her what she’s doing when the air behind her shimmers, and a second raven lands on one of the gravestones.

“Oh, now this is getting silly!” snaps Alice. “Ravens and gods and...” She freezes and stares at Cam, then at Huginn, as if registering the other girl for the first time. “How did you find me? Who’s this?”

Swallowing hard, Cam shakes his head. “This is Huginn,” he says, and the girl gives a low bow to Alice, as if she’s in some medieval court instead of a dank graveyard. “And I’m guessing this must be Muninn.”

“Hoo-the-what-now?” Alice says. If her eyes open any wider, she’s in danger of them falling straight out. As always, her emotions are swift to change, and now her anger has shifted into bemused confusion.

The raven croaks and flaps its wings, shuffling inky black feathers into smoothness. It looks more like a mobile patch of night than a bird, and it’s only the glint of light on its eyes that reminds Cam it’s alive.

“This is my sister, Muninn,” Huginn says. “She’s easier to contact in places like this, where memories and the world overlap more closely.”

“I must be going mad,” Cam says, “because that almost sounded like it made sense.”

Huginn gives him a look to easily rival any of Frankie’s expressions and steps over to her sister, where she bends her head towards the huge bird. Cam would swear, despite the silence, that they’re having a conversation. It’s probably about him. Eventually, Muninn ruffles her feathers again, then drifts on silent wings to land on the headstone next to him and Alice.

Elbowing Cam in the ribs, Alice stage-whispers, “Are they both ravens? Or both girls?”

The raven stares at Alice and gives a disapproving creak.

Cam swallows the nervous lump in his throat—again—and tries to bow like Huginn did. He makes a bit of a mess of it, but the bird seems somewhat less critical than it had beforehand, so on balance, it was probably a good idea.

“Erm,” Cam says. “Erm, hi. Hello. I think, maybe, you might be able to help me. See, I had this notebook...”

Huginn marches through the wet grass, shaking her head. “Odin’s eye, you humans are as useless as damp firewood at times. Look, this will save time.” She puts a hand to Cam’s cold fingers, grasping them tightly, and her other hand rests lightly on Muninn’s skull.

For a moment, Cam doesn’t feel anything other than chilly and regretful. Then, a spark flickers through his brain, nudging its way between his memories, tingling across his scalp and raising his hair. A sudden flash of recollection brings him back to the playground, rain drizzling into puddles on the grey tarmac, and Loki waving the notebook at him.

A moment later, he’s back in the graveyard, and Huginn is shaking her hands. Tiny, glowing motes of light drift from around her fingertips.

“What’s that?” Alice asks.

Huginn shrugs. “Leftover thoughts. Half-finished ideas which got stuck to me on the way out.” She pauses, giving Alice a complicated look. “You probably don’t want to know.”

Alice’s eyebrows go up another notch; Cam winces. Clearly, Huginn might be all-mighty and powerful, but she doesn’t know Alice very well. That sort of comment is practically guaranteed to get Alice’s stubborn side to dig in its heels.

Sure enough, Alice takes a deep breath, the better to make a start on arguing her case, but at that moment, Muninn utters a creak and flies straight at Cam. With her huge, black-clawed feet aimed directly for his face.

Cam gasps and stumbles backwards, catching his heel on a buried edge of stone. For a brief moment, he hangs in the air, weightless, while gravity tries to figure out what happens next. Half a breath later, his skull crashes onto stone. The already-dark graveyard gets a whole lot darker.

Chapter 21

“Cam? Cam?”

Everything hurts. Cam contemplates opening his eyes, then decides he feels better with them shut. Tears prickle and burn at the inside of his eyelids and his nose tingles. He’s not going to cry. It might hurt, but he’s not going to—

“Oh, God, I think he might be dead. Maybe he has a concussion. Is that a thing? I think it’s a thing. Do we need to do CPR? Is he breathing? Cam!”

Cam opens his eyes to try and stop Alice from panicking. This action fails to reduce her frantic stream of worries; instead, she starts talking at him instead of about him.

“Cam! I was so worried! Can you move your fingers? How about your feet? How do you feel? Can you sit up? Is your head broken? Do I need to call an ambulance?”

The deluge of questions washes over him like a comforting—if slightly painful—shower, reminding him he’s alive and someone cares about him. Then he becomes aware of the actual rain, pouring in rivers from the black sky, and the solid stone beneath his head and back.

“Ow,” he says. Then, because that doesn’t seem to sufficiently convey his discomfort, he repeats it. He struggles to sit up and rubs at the back of his head. It doesn’t feel broken. He certainly can’t feel any brains leaking out between the hair, although there’s a few bits of wet moss which cause him a moment’s concern.

Alice flings cold and soggy arms around him in a bear hug. “You’re alive! I was so worried! Loki’s gone, and so’s the raven, and Huginn’s muttering things about how fragile humans are, and it’s chucking it down, and I’m not even entirely sure where we are—only I think it’s a graveyard—and Loki wanted to raise the dead, and—”

Cam holds up a hand. “Breathe,” he manages to say, as Alice’s rising flood of words falters. She sounds as if she’s about to burst into tears. Again. This is an entire evening made of the unusual and unsettling.

She leans back and stares at him, her eyes wide in the gloom. “What are we going to do?” she asks. “Can you fix this? With magic?”

He has no idea. He doesn’t even know if this can be fixed, let alone if he can fix it.

A shadow moves in the darkness and resolves itself into the shape of Huginn, who strides towards them.

“You’re not dead,” she says, sounding a little disappointed.

“No. What—why did Muninn do that?”

The raven girl shrugs. “Who knows why she does anything? Maybe she was trying to turn you into a memory, something she could...” She pauses for a moment, mid-thought, then says, “I’m pleased you’re not dead.”

“Um.” Cam rubs at his skull again. “Thank you. I think.” He’s not sure how he feels about the idea of being turned into a memory, of being something in the past rather than the present.

“We have to find Loki.” Huginn’s voice is colder than the earth around them, and the hand she offers Cam is colder still.

He takes it and gets to his feet, waits for the world to stop swaying, then nods. “Okay. Can you follow him again?”

She gives him a black steel glare, as if he’s asked if she breathes oxygen. “Of course.”

“I’m not flying,” Cam says, hurriedly. “Just in case you were thinking.”

Alice perks up. “Flying?”

Cam shakes his head. “Much harder than it looks. Trust me.”

But that’s it: she’s sold. Alice is one of those people who are always moving. Even when she’s sitting, she’s moving. Fingers twirling through hair, feet tapping against the chair... every inch of her was born to fidget. Given half a chance, she perches on chairs, knees up at table height, shifting her weight constantly on the balls of her feet. The teachers have given up trying to get her to ‘sit properly’, and have mostly accepted that if she’s at least on the chair in some way, she’s not climbing the walls. Despite himself, Cam grins at the memory this dredges up: Alice in their Reception class, climbing the built-in bookcase in their classroom in order to retrieve the paper plane he’d accidentally launched to the top of it.

So the idea of flying—of being able to move in any direction she desires—is something Alice will be hooked by.

Sure enough, she’s next to Huginn in a heartbeat, bouncing on the tips of her toes in the long, wet grass.

“Make me fly,” she says, and Cam hears the hope in her voice. “Please?”

Huginn gives Cam a piercing look which suggests he might be better off in a different country, or possibly a different universe. She touches Alice lightly on the arm, the air shimmers in a way that’s becoming strangely familiar, and then a barn owl is perched on the nearest gravestone, white feathers near-luminescent in the darkness.

“Alice?” Cam watches as the bird turns its head this way and that, looking over its shoulder with huge eyes.

The Alice-owl hoots, spreads silent wings, and launches herself into the night as if she’s been flying since before she could crawl.

Well, that’s simply not fair.

“I assume you’re going to follow on foot?” Huginn asks.

Cam has barely finished nodding before the girl is a raven once more, a patch of starless night which croaks in displeasure before taking off after Alice.

Cam sighs, and follows the two birds, his feet finding their way through the maze of long grass and leaning stones.

This time, without the tight ache of worry about Alice in his chest, he can run freely. He could keep this up forever, he thinks, as he heads under the lych-gate—don’t think of the dead, don’t think of the dead—and shadows the ghostly wings of Alice up the hill. She swoops in long, silent glides from tree to tree, pausing every so often to let him catch up. Huginn is as good as invisible in the night, and he finds himself wondering if she turned Alice into a barn owl so that he wouldn’t be entirely lost.

At the top of the hill, the three of them stop at the iron gates to the old park. It’s not as popular or fun as the one with the decent playground, where the council spent lots of money to build a new wooden climbing frame with ropes and nets, so Cam hasn’t been up here for a while, but it was where Frankie used to bring Alice and him when they were very little. He could find his way around it with his eyes closed, which is useful in the gloom.

Huginn settles on a branch on the other side of the gate and cocks her head to one side. Alice drifts to land beside her, huge eyes watching Cam intently.

Cam eyes up the gate. It’s taller than he is, with spiked railings on the top to match the fence along either side.

“This is a bad idea,” he mutters. He grabs two of the spikes, wedging his feet against the wrought iron, and hauls himself up and over before he has a chance to think about how gravity works.

Go on, says Huginn’s voice in his head. Talk to him.

“And this is an epically bad idea,” Cam says, but he strides towards the old park anyway, his heart thumping. A solitary streetlight casts the climbing frame, swings, and slide in a ghostly, blueish light. Sharp shadows hug the space, pressing in against the edges, as if the darkness is trying to swallow the playground whole.

Loki is on the swings, kicking one foot back and forth aimlessly, and leaning against the rusty chains. Cam approaches warily, trying not to make any noise. He’s not sure if that’s the right thing to do, though, because what if sneaking up on a Norse god is a terrible idea?

He pauses, mid-step, and considers this. What if Loki turns round and zaps him into oblivion? He has no doubts about the god’s abilities.

“Oh, come on, Cam. I know you’re there.” Loki hasn’t moved and is still facing away from him, but his voice is bored and irritable.

Cam finishes his step and trudges the last few metres towards the swings.

“How did you know?” he asks as he draws closer.

This time, Loki leans back on the swing until he’s almost upside down, staring at Cam from resigned eyes. His golden blonde hair hangs wild around his head, the tips brushing against a puddle on the ground. “Ask a stupid question,” he says, “get a stupid answer.”

Cam shrugs and takes a seat on the swing at the other end of the frame. He kicks a foot against the weedy tarmac and sets the swing into motion. The chains are icy cold under his fingers and wet with the rain.

“What do you want?” Loki asks. He sounds tired and fed up.

For a long time, Cam doesn’t answer. He runs through several options in his mind, dismissing them all as too honest, too challenging, too blunt. Eventually, he lets out a deep, frustrated breath.

“I don’t know,” he says, simply. “I just... I want this to stop. I want you to stop, whatever it is you’re doing. Alice’s right, y’know. You could do awesome things. We could do awesome things. And I’ve never been in that position before, where I could make a difference. So.”

He doesn’t look at Loki, but the chains and frame of the swings creak as the other boy moves.

“What would you change?” Loki’s voice is quiet in the darkness.

Everything, Cam thinks, but doesn’t say. He’d change the way people react to him at school, the way his family is a joke to everyone who’s not him or Alice. He’d make sure they had enough money so he could get the things everyone else seemed to have, and he’d change things for Alice so she’d be safe and have someone reliable looking after her. He does his best to pretend, for her sake, that he doesn’t notice how dirty her clothes are when she forgets to wash them, or how she relies on him bringing in extra lunches. She used to help out the lunch staff at their primary school because it meant she got second and third helpings, but that’s not an option now they’re at Highgrove. Theo does his best, but the older Alice’s brother gets, the less he’s around to keep her safe. With a sudden fierceness that surprises him, Cam realises he’d bring Alice home with him for good, if he could. He’d bring Dad home, too, because the house doesn’t feel like a home properly without him, for all that Frankie and Mum make such an effort. A spike of guilt stabs him through the stomach as he considers that last thought.

“We could change the world,” Loki murmurs. “But I wouldn’t know where to start, and I’d probably get it wrong. I usually do. And I’m tired of messing up.” He twists on his seat to gaze at Cam and, for a moment, looks every year of his incredible age. His eyes have a haunted, aching pain to them that Cam knows he’ll remember forever. Then, in a heartbeat, the look is gone, and it’s plain old Loman sat beside him on the swing again.

“Maybe we should start smaller,” Cam says. “Fix things at Highgrove.”

“Danny?” Loki asks.

“Yeah.”

A glimmer of something Cam recognises from the first time he’d seen Loman sparks in the other boy’s expression. “Well, that could be fun.”

“I don’t want him to die,” Cam adds, in a hurry, in case that is something Loki is considering.

Loki laughs. “Fair enough. Murder and mortal accidents are off the table. How about maiming?”

Cam shakes his head firmly, his mind’s eye drifting to when Danny had stabbed himself with the paper shuriken. “Absolutely not.”

“You’re no fun at all.” Loman’s attention shifts to somewhere behind Cam. “You can stop lurking, Huginn,” he says. “I know you’re there. And Alice, too.”

The raven girl and Alice step out of a patch of shadow and come to stand together by the side of the swings. Huginn’s arms are folded, and a deep frown creases the space between her eyebrows. Alice looks uncertainly from Cam to Loki, then back again. Loki studies them both for a moment, biting his lower lip. Then he grins as if someone’s said something only he heard.

“Oh, come on, Huginn,” he says, a mocking laugh lingering behind his words. “You know me better than that.”

“You’ll come back?” she asks.

Loki looks resigned. “Of course I will. I always do. But we can have some fun first; you don’t have to drag me back to snakes and dire peril just yet, right?”

Huginn’s expression could cut through solid steel, but she nods. “Very well. What did you have in mind?”

Chapter 22

“One week,” Huginn says, after the longest ten minutes of Cam’s life have been spent in tense discussion. “No longer. And, for the record, I still think this is a terrible idea.”

Loki—Loman, now, Cam thinks—rolls his eyes and sighs theatrically. “One week. Seven days. One hundred and sixty-eight hours. Ten thousand and eighty minutes. Six hundred and four thou—”

“Thank you, Loki.” The raven girl glares at the god, who beams but shuts up. Then she turns her gaze to Cam, who shrinks into the swing seat and tries to not look as if he was in any way, shape or form responsible for any of these events.

“I’m putting this in your hands, Wordsmith,” she says, in a tone suggesting argument is out of the question. “You summoned him; he is your responsibility.”

Alice nudges Cam with a pointed elbow, and he finds his voice lurking somewhere near his toes. “Um,” he says, and Alice pokes him again. “What if... I mean, he’s a god, for God’s sake! I can’t control him!”

Huginn’s mouth twists in something Cam optimistically hopes is the beginnings of a smile. “Then I suggest you learn. Quickly.”

“Why don’t you come to school with us?” Alice suggests. “I mean, if Loki can do it, you can, right? And you could help keep an eye on him.”

“Technically, she’s already been in an English lesson,” Loman points out.

“I think if a raven joined 7TB, Mr Barker would have a heart attack,” Cam says. “If she does join, it has to be like this.”

Huginn shakes her head. “I will not be joining your school,” she says. “Not in my natural form, nor in this one.”

Loki grins. “Go on, Fjær, it’ll be fun.”

The girl huffs and her expression sours. “You know I don’t like it when you call me that.”

Loki’s tone turns wheedling. “After all, you know you love keeping an eye on me. You’ll be able to put a stop to any shenanigans your feathered backside disapproves of. Clean up the mess before it even happens.” His gaze slides to Cam. “And you can train the Wordsmith to make sure he doesn’t do anything... dangerous. Hazardous, one might say, towards any unsuspecting—”

Huginn throws her hands in the air in defeat. “All right, all right! Fine! Happy now? I’ll come and spend the next seven days in a mortal educational environment, surrounded by young human thoughts.” She shudders. “I’ll need a month of bathing afterwards. Mortal minds are so... grubby.”

“Gee, thanks,” Alice mutters.

Cam, on the other hand, is at least slightly grateful Huginn will be coming along. She might be difficult and judgemental, but at least she seems to know what she’s talking about. And knowing how easily he can screw up his magic, having someone around who could help would be beneficial. Maybe she might also know about Shadow Shifters and what his mum can do.

The following thought slams into Cam’s brain so fast he nearly falls off his swing.

“Oh, no!”

It’s so late that he doesn’t even dare to think what time it is. His phone is back in his bedroom, and if Mum or Frankie realise he’s not at home, he will be grounded until Ragnarok comes round for real.

“I’ve got to get home,” he says. “NOW.”

––––––––

THERE’S A POLICE CAR parked outside the house, and if Cam thought his stomach couldn’t tangle itself into any more knots, he was apparently wrong.

“That’s not good,” Alice says, in the understatement of the century. “What’re you gonna do?”

Until now, Cam had been wistfully harbouring the fantasy of being able to sneak back into his bedroom, curl up in bed, and have Mum and Frankie be none the wiser for his night-time excursion. This is, quite clearly, not going to happen.

“I have no idea,” he groans. “Frankie’s gonna murder me.”

“With the mortal lawmakers present, that seems an unlikely turn of events,” Huginn notes.

Loman gives a snort of laughter.

Cam sighs. “It was nice knowing you all. See you in about fifty years, when I’m finally allowed back out again.”

“Do you want me to come with?” Alice offers.

He shakes his head. “Not worth getting you in trouble as well.”

“They’ll know you were with me,” she points out. “It’s not like you’d sneak out of the house on your own.”

It’s a valid argument; he’s not exactly known for breaking the rules. For a moment he considers it. Alice is good at deflecting blame, and she doesn’t react to it the same way he does, which is to curl into a ball and wait for the shame and embarrassment to eventually fade away. Then he shakes his head again. “No, it’s okay. You go home.”

She scrunches up her face in disapproval, then shrugs. “It’s your funeral.”

“It probably will be,” Cam mutters. He stuffs his hands deep into his pockets and slouches towards the house, leaving Alice in the company of the Norse god of mischief and one of Odin’s ravens.

He’s barely made it to the gate when the front door flies open. There’s a cry of recognition, and Frankie comes hurtling towards him. She grabs him into a bear hug, yells something over her shoulder, and manages to crush the air from his lungs in one swift movement before he has a chance to say a word.

“Where have you been? Are you all right? Are you hurt? Don’t you ever dare do that again! Oh, Cam, we love you, and you can’t scare us like that!” She continues on in this manner, holding him so tightly he can’t breathe.

Cam pushes against her embrace, trying to gasp in some of the cold night air past the softness of her cardigan. “I need oxygen, Frankie,” he protests, and she loosens her grip a fraction. Holding him by the shoulders, she takes a reluctant step back and stares into his eyes. He’s sure she can see the guilt etched through him.

“You frightened us silly, vanishing like that,” she whispers, shaking her head. “Please, Cam. Don’t ever do that again.” Tears glisten in her eyes, catching light from the open front door.

Then Mum is there, and he goes through it all again, the fierce hugs, the tears and furious love. Guilt swamps him whole and he hugs her, then Frankie, then Mum another time.

“I won’t ever run away again,” he promises, when they finally let him go.

The police—one younger woman, one middle-aged man—appear, wearing identical expressions of disapproval and black uniforms. They speak sternly to Cam about the dangers of running away before getting into their car and leaving, much to his immense relief. Their telling-off wasn’t nearly as awful as seeing Mum and Frankie crying.

“Why did you go?” Frankie asks, as she pushes the front gate shut, and they walk into the house. “Are you unhappy? Can we help?”

Cam swallows awkwardly. Words are so hard when he’s feeling like this. He knows what he ought to say, but it’s always so difficult to try and speak when every part of him wants to crawl into a hole in the ground and wait for everything to stop. He wants to be hugged, he wants to be left alone, and he doesn’t know what he wants, except that it’s not this. In the end, he says, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. It was... It was really important. I’m sorry.”

“Really important?” Mum’s expression clouds with confusion. “What do you mean?” She closes the door behind them and leans against it, looking at him with teary eyes.

“Don’t cry, Mum,” he says. “I had to do something. To help Alice.” Then, because her eyes are still shining, he adds, “Please don’t cry anymore. I’m safe. It’s all okay.”

She puts an arm around his shoulders and leads him to the sofa. “Is Alice in trouble?”

“She was. That’s why I had to try and help her.”

Frankie sits on the arm of the sofa and frowns. “You should have told us, Cam. We could have helped.”

Cam thinks of Loki on the swings, of the brief but unsettling moment when the god had looked... sad. Lonely. And he tries to imagine how that might have worked with Frankie there, or Mum. Then, he shakes his head. “No, I don’t think you could. But I fixed things. It’s okay; you don’t have to worry any more. We’re all safe.”

Mum is silent for a long time. Then she says, “Where’s the book?”

He doesn’t even have to ask which book she means. “It’s in my chest of drawers.”

“You took it without asking,” she says. “Why?”

“I wanted to find out about my... about what I can do.” Cam stares at his fingers, twisting in the hem of his muddy jumper. He hadn’t realised how wet and cold he’d managed to get, and his body’s only just starting to send in reports. Hands: frozen. Feet: soaked. Clothes: drenched and filthy. Head: throbbing from where he landed on the gravestone. And he’s starving. And really, really tired.

“You figured it out,” Frankie says. “Really? What can you do?”

“In a minute,” Mum says, giving Cam another hug. This time he puts his arms around her and hugs her back, wrapped up in warmth and love and reassurance. “Hot chocolate, pyjamas, and then we can talk about it.”

Chapter 23

The lump of fossilised cake, which has sat like concrete in Cam’s stomach for forever, is slowly dissolving in the warmth of hot chocolate. Cam snuggles between Frankie and Mum, all of them underneath Mum’s heavy weighted blanket, with fairy lights twinkling and casting the room in a rosy glow. Wrapped in thick pyjamas and a dressing gown, with only damp hair to remind him of his night-time adventures, Cam feels safe and loved. And, for the first time in days, he’s not holding onto a secret.

Well, he thinks, as he sips his drink and leans against Frankie’s shoulder, he’s not holding onto all of a secret. He’s not entirely sure he’s ready to come clean about Loman and who his new friend really is. Not yet.

“So,” Mum says, smiling sleepily. “You found your Gift.”

Cam nods. “But I don’t know what I can do with it. It’s... it’s a bit terrifying, actually. Um. And I found out about yours when I tried to find stuff about mine, and that was scary too.”

Mum ruffles his curls. “It’s okay, Cam. It frightened me, too, when I found out about speaking with the dead. For a long time, I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”

He turns and looks up at her, astonished. “You didn’t?”

Frankie chuckles. “You should’ve seen her. She slammed her bedroom door and refused to come out. Not for school, not for friends, not for anyone or anything.”

“What changed?”

“I spoke to the dead,” Mum says, quietly. “A friend of the family passed away, and there was some... Things weren’t going well for their family.”

Frankie snorts. “They were being haunted, is what she’s trying to say. Floating furniture, soured milk, blown lightbulbs. And good grief, that place was draughty. It was like the windows were open all of the time in midwinter.”

“So you went there?”

Mum nods. “Your grandparents practically dragged me out of the house, kicking and screaming.”

“She’s not even remotely kidding,” Frankie whispers. “I thought she was going to pull the door off its hinges. Mum and Dad hit the roof, and that was that. She went with them, then.”

“And you fixed things?” Cam is fascinated by this previously unknown version of Mum. He can’t imagine her throwing tantrums or misbehaving. Frankie, sure, he could believe it of her, but Mum? No way.

She smiles. “I did. I didn’t expect to, but... I did. I spoke to the elderly lady who’d died, found out why she was upset, and then encouraged her to move on.”

“Did she?”

“Yes. After I’d explained about the new and updated will, which changed a few things for the family.”

“And did that make things better? For you, I mean? Like, did you stop worrying about stuff?”

She snuggles in next to him, pulling him closer. “Not immediately. Sometimes these things take time. You need to adjust and figure stuff out, sweetheart. Just like I did, and that’s okay.”

Frankie nods. “But you have to promise to not scare us like that again, Cam. I know it’s frightening, but you can’t go running off in the middle of the night.”

He nods. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He shakes his head. A small part of him is tempted to come clean about everything, about Loki and Huginn and the fact he might have stopped Ragnarok from happening. But he’s not quite ready to be that honest, not quite yet.

“Was it to do with your gift?” Mum’s arm around him is warm and comforting, and he leans against her, letting his eyes drift closed.

“Mmm.”

“And Alice was in trouble,” Mum continues.

Cam nods sleepily.

“Well... I’m glad you’re both safe,” she says, giving him a kiss on the top of his head. “She is safe, isn’t she?”

Cam thinks of Alice, with Loman and Huginn for company, and wonders briefly if she is safe. He notes wearily that Mum doesn’t ask if Alice is home. Then, he nods again. Huginn wouldn’t let anything happen; he’s confident of that much.

“Good.” Mum strokes his hair. “Come on, you should go to bed before you fall asleep here.”

In a half-awake dream state, Cam allows Mum to lead him upstairs to his room, where she tucks him into bed for the first time in months.

“Sleep well,” she says, smiling at him. In his cabin bed, he’s almost level with her. “I love you, Cam.”

“I love you, too,” he mumbles, although he’s already asleep by the time she leaves the room, pulling the door closed behind her.

––––––––

CAM FALLS INTO VIVID dreams. He’s in the dining room of the family home, and several things grab his attention straight away.

One, although the decorating is wrong, it’s clearly the same room. The fireplace is identical, including the chip in the marble hearth where someone had dropped the coal bucket years before he was even born. A brown and yellow patterned carpet, which looks as if someone took their design inspiration from vomit, has replaced the deep red he’s used to, and the walls are a faded mustard in colour. But he recognises the shape, the spaces, the doors and windows, and the view through to the long galley kitchen.

Two, he’s not alone in the room. He’s really not alone. A whole family is gathered around the table, and it takes him a moment or two to figure out why they look familiar. Despite her dark curls being tamed into a short bob, and the fact that she looks a quarter of a century younger, he recognises Frankie. She’s wearing a purple velvet party dress and silver earrings, with all the awkwardness he recognises from other kids at school. It’s weird to see his confident, outgoing aunt looking embarrassed and gawky. Next to her, a couple of years older, with her hair straightened and tied back in a sleek ponytail, and before she got her glasses, is Mum. Which means the couple in their forties—the parents, he guesses—would be his grandparents. He doesn’t remember meeting either of them; they both died when he was very young, but he’s seen photos.

Oh, and there’s a raven standing on the back of one of the chairs. Staring at him with inky-black eyes which could have been carved from onyx.

Third—and he’s not entirely sure how to feel about this, or any of it, if he’s honest with himself—he’s invisible. Or, at least, nobody in the room seems to have noticed him. He holds a hand out and it’s grey, fuzzy around the edges and indistinct.

“Hello?”

The family, his family, doesn’t respond or react in any way. They’re focused on something on the table, and Cam realises with a jolt that it’s the book. Libris Sapientia is right there, and Frankie’s dressed like it’s...

“Oh.” Cam looks closely at the raven. Muninn. Memory. “This is Frankie’s twelfth birthday, isn’t it?”

The bird hops and manages to look pleased.

“Okay.” Cam rubs the bridge of his nose, then takes in the scene before him. “This isn’t... It isn’t real. It’s a memory. But... but I can see it.”

Cam’s mum, Rowan, says something, and Frankie giggles.

“I can hear it.”

He runs an insubstantial finger across the back of the sofa. It’s dark red velvet, brand new and soft. He has a vague memory of it from when he was a toddler, when it was old and tatty and all the springs had given up. It was the sofa that ate people, according to Frankie, and when his grandfather had died, they’d used part of the inheritance to buy a new one.

“I can touch it. It all feels so real.”

Muninn cocks her head to one side and stares at him. Then, she pointedly looks at Frankie.

Only now, it’s not Frankie.

Cam blinks. It’s like he’s seeing two people occupying the same space. One is Frankie—twelve-year-old-Frankie—the other is Alice.

“Wait.” Cam stares at Alice-Frankie and tries to figure out what he’s seeing. “She wasn’t here. She couldn’t be here.”

The raven croaks and makes a huffing sound, as if deeply unimpressed with his intuition.

“Clearly, she wasn’t here.” He tiptoes over to stand beside the figures at the table, who are laughing and talking as if he isn’t even there. Which, of course, he isn’t. Not really. And, now he’s concentrating, he realises he can’t understand anything of what they’re saying. It sounds like real words, but the moment he starts trying to listen, the syllables blur and shift, and it’s like they’re speaking in another language.

He glances back to Muninn. “If this is a memory, why is she here?”

The raven looks at him with unblinking black eyes. Figure it out, she seems to be saying.

“Fine,” he says. “So... she’s here.” He watches as Frankie opens the book, Alice’s hands translucent through her fingers. Frankie picks up a fountain pen and gives the small gathering a nervous smile.

“Can you remember things that haven’t happened yet?” Cam asks, not able to take his eyes off Alice-Frankie as the girls sign the book. He can see two overlapping names on the page, one in blue, one in purple.

Muninn doesn’t respond.

There’s a moment where everything pauses, as if the whole scene before him has been frozen in time, then it jolts, flickers, and vanishes. Cam is left, standing in a void of stars and nebulae, the dining room vision fading like smoke. He turns to the raven and finds it watching him. Constellations glimmer like fragments of broken mirrors against the velvety sky, and he wonders if he could reach out and touch them. They seem so close.

“You wanted to show me something,” he says to the bird.

Silence hangs among the stars.

“Alice needs to write her name in the book,” he says, trying to decipher what he’s just seen through his drowsy mind. “Will that work? Can she even do that?”

More silence.

“I thought it was just for my family.” Cam closes his eyes and floats in nothingness. When he opens his eyes again, he’s awake in bed. The only stars are the glow-in-the-dark ones dotted across his ceiling, faint and familiar.

There is no raven, but when he rolls over to lie on his other side, a long, black feather pokes him in the cheek.

Chapter 24

The coach is waiting outside school when Cam and Alice arrive, breathless and five minutes late. Mr Barker, dressed in his usual dreary colour choices—where the orange sweater came from, Cam may never know—raises an eyebrow and ticks them off on his list.

“You’re in a group with Mrs Whitlow,” he announces. “Do you have your lunches?”

Cam nods, and Alice shrugs. “Probably,” she says. “I’ve got money for the café there.”

Their teacher glares. “You’re not supposed to have cash on trips,” he says. Then he decides he clearly can’t be bothered to fight this battle today, sighs, and moves on to question Ayana and Lucy, who seem to have brought half a make-up counter with them for their short bus journey.

Alice hurls her rucksack into the hold space of the coach, where it bounces and rolls. Then she beams at Cam. “Sit next to you?”

He nods, putting his own bag in more carefully, and wondering where Loman might be. Alice had been waiting for him by the old railway bridge as usual, but she’d been on her own.

“Did Lo – Loman go home last night?” he asks, as they climb the steep steps onto the coach under the watchful eye of Ms Harrow.

“Dunno,” Alice says, flinging herself into a spare seat and pressing her nose to the window. She breathes out a cloud and writes a rude word backwards on the steamed-up glass, then grins at Cam. “Maybe.”

“Where do you think home is for him?” Cam sits beside her. “I mean, he clearly doesn’t have a family here.” He keeps his voice low, although he can’t imagine anyone would bother listening in on their conversation.

Alice wrinkles her nose at him. “I don’t know. I’m sure he’s fine. He and Huginn went off together. Does she count as his family, d’you think?”

“I don’t know. And they’re not here, either of them,” Cam mutters, twisting in his seat and peering anxiously along the length of the noisy coach.

“Looking for your freaky friend?” Danny yells, making an offensive gesture in his direction, well-hidden from the gimlet glare of Ms Harrow. “Guess he can’t be bothered to show up today.”

Cam slumps back down and stares at the back of the seat in front of him. “Do you think he’s okay?” he whispers.

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Alice says, brushing off his concern with a wave of her hand. “Look,” she adds, giving him a reassuring smile and lowering her voice enough that it doesn’t carry halfway down the coach. “He’s a literal god. Like, what’s the worst that could happen?”

Cam doesn’t dare to contemplate that as a question. He’s seen the Loki side of Loman threatening to raise the dead, to take over the world, to bring about Ragnarok. The worst that could happen is not something he even wants to consider. Instead, he shrugs and picks at the edge of the multi-coloured fabric of the seat, remembering the unsettling, haunted look Loman had given him. It had been fleeting, gone in an instant, but it lingered in his thoughts.

What did you do, he wonders, if you were a god but you were afraid?

––––––––

THE JOURNEY IS AS RAUCOUS as every other class trip Cam’s been on. The boys in the middle of the coach start chanting a football song within five minutes of leaving Highgrove, and it takes another minute or two before a teacher decides to put a stop to it.

Cam tunes out the chorus of grumbled complaints and stares past Alice to the world beyond. It’s roughly what he’d expect from his birthday week—grey and uninspiring—although at least it’s not currently raining.

After a minute or two, he gets out his phone and a set of in-ear headphones. He passes one headphone to Alice, and they sit in comfortable companionship, listening to the latest Comets Collide album until the coach pulls into the car park outside the museum.

Huginn and Loman are waiting by the main entrance to the building. Huginn is dressed entirely in black, which comes as no surprise. The dark spirals of her hair are caught back in a messy bun, coils escaping in every direction, and her critical gaze is fixed firmly on the pupils cascading from the coach. Cam is relieved to see the sclera of her eyes are white, making her appear more human than when he’d last seen her, although there is an indefinable something about the raven girl which sets her apart from everyone else.

Loman, in direct contrast, is wearing the most vivid violet hoody Cam has ever seen. He beams as Cam descends the coach’s steps, then grins wider as Alice launches herself in a flying leap from the top step. He strides over to join them, still chuckling.

Alice has grabbed her bag and Cam’s from the scrum at the side of the coach by the time Loman reaches them, Huginn trailing behind him like an irritable black cloud. She scowls at Cam as she draws nearer.

“There are too many people,” she announces. “This is a horrible idea.”

“Stick with us,” Alice says, bouncing her bag off one foot. “They’ll try to put us in groups, but it never works like that, not really.”

Huginn’s expression doesn’t cheer up. She casts a grim look around at the assembling hordes of 7TB and shakes her head. “I don’t know why I allowed you to talk me into this,” she mutters.

“If you didn’t come, you’d never get to know if you could have prevented me from carrying out unwise shenanigans,” Loman points out. “If you’re here, you can glower and glare and appeal to my better nature.”

“Are you ever involved in shenanigans that are wise?” Alice enquires.

Loman laughs. “There’s a first time for everything.”

Something tight inside Cam loosens at the sound of his friend’s amusement. He’s feeling better for seeing Loman and Huginn both safe, even if the latter looks like she’d rather be anywhere but here. Mr Barker strides over, checking his list and frowning at Loman.

“You missed the coach,” he says.

Loman gives him an apologetic look and a winning smile. “Sorry, sir. I got a lift, I didn’t want to miss the trip, and I was running late.”

“Hmm.” Mr Barker ticks on his sheet. “And this would be?”

Cam and Alice exchange a look of concern, but Loman is unfazed. “Ginny,” he says, as if that should explain everything.

Huginn’s prickly glare turns into something which could bore through solid stone, but she stays silent.

“Ginny...” Mr Barker runs his pen down the side of the clipboard, then taps it thoughtfully on the edge of the plastic. “I don’t have her on here.”

“She’s new, sir,” Loman explains helpfully. “Started a day or so after I did. Maybe the office just hasn’t updated their class list yet.” His eyes bore into the teacher as if he can see to the man’s core. Mr Barker’s expression gains a slightly glazed look, similar to Mrs Winters when Loman had marched in and dragged Alice out of her session. It’s a little unsettling to see his teacher in thrall to Loman like this, but Cam stays silent for now. If it means Huginn will be with them for the rest of the trip, it’s a price he’s willing to pay.

“Hmm.”

“That does seem likely, Mr Barker,” Alice adds. “It took them ages to add me to the register; do you remember?”

“All right, all right,” Mr Barker concedes. “Ginny, was it?”

Huginn, scowling, nods reluctantly, and the teacher scribbles a name at the bottom of his sheet of paper. “There. You can join these reprobates on the trip,” he says. “For your sins. Mrs Whitlow is just over there.” He gives a vague wave of his hand before hurrying off to deal with Danny and his followers, who are trying to climb inside the luggage compartment of the coach.

“You lied to him,” Huginn hisses. “And my name is not Ginny.” For a brief moment, her eyes turn solid black, and there’s a suggestion of shadowed wings behind her.

Loman shrugs. “Calm down, Fjær. You think your real name wouldn’t raise any questions? I only lied to him to get you in with us. I suppose you could stay out here, but then you’d have no way of knowing what dastardly plots I was acting out in front of all these fragile mortals...”

The raven girl makes an exasperated noise which wouldn’t sound out of place coming from her bird form, but the darkening around her fades away, and her eyes return to normal. “Fine,” she mutters. “But only because I don’t trust you.”

He beams. “That’s because I’m inherently untrustworthy.”

“For once, he speaks the truth,” Huginn stage-whispers to Cam, which only makes Loman’s smile wider.

Mrs Whitlow is waiting for Cam and his friends by the side of the coach. She’s a petite woman in her mid-thirties, quiet and unassuming, and works as a learning mentor. Brynn stands beside her and shoots Cam a shy smile as the little group approach, although they give Alice a wary look of apprehension, chewing nervously on an end of chin-length brown hair. Purple-framed glasses rest on the tip of their nose, and Brynn pushes them back up a fraction as Cam watches, adding another finger smudge.

Cam doesn’t know much about Brynn, only that they were home-schooled for the last few years of primary. Maybe they’re someone he could be friends with—they certainly seem okay. He smiles back hopefully. It would be nice to have another friend and someone else to talk to. And Brynn’s only a couple of inches taller than he is, too, unlike Alice who grows like an enthusiastic weed and shows no sign of stopping, regardless of how little she seems to eat.

“I didn’t break anyone’s fingers,” Alice says by way of greeting. “Just in case you were worried. Hi, Mrs Whitlow.”

With a gentle smile, Mrs Whitlow ticks off Cam, Alice, and Loman on her list, then glances at Huginn with a faintly confused frown.

“Ginny,” Huginn mutters, waves of annoyance pooling off her with every breath.

“The office missed her off the lists,” Loman explains. “She’s with us, Mr Barker said.”

“All right.” Mrs Whitlow adds ‘Ginny’ to her paperwork, then gives them all a bright, fond smile. She’s one of the few adults at school Cam trusts. If he was braver, he would talk to her about some of the other things going on in his life. About how difficult he’s finding everything, and that he’s not sure how to cope with the anxiety and concerns which claw their way into every part of his day. She would be understanding, given that Brynn goes to see her several times a week due to their mental health.

But talking to Mrs Whitlow would mean lying about the magic and some of the reasons he has for all his uneasy worries, so it’s probably simpler to try and work it through on his own. At least he has Alice.

Their small group is left to bring up the rear, and so they trail after the last few students from Highgrove through the doors of the Science and Media Museum. So far, Cam thinks, so good.

Chapter 25

The first thing Cam sees when they get inside the museum is the display of computers dating back several decades. He listens to the idle chatter of the rest of his class as they laugh at the tiny monitors and clunky tech, then turns to Loman.

The other boy is leaning against a pillar, his bright blue eyes narrowed as he takes in their surroundings.

“It’s weird,” Loman admits. “Seeing it all like this. I... I haven’t really paid much attention to what humanity’s been up to over the last few centuries. They made such advancements in such a short time.”

Huginn sniffs. “Not all good ones,” she comments. “In fact, I’m not sure many of these were good.”

“Oh, get over yourself, birdbrain,” Loman shrugs. “Their creativity is one of the best things about mortals. Even if half of it does invent further ways to waste their precious lives.”

Alice digs him in the ribs with a bony elbow. “In case either of you had forgotten,” she says sarcastically, “you’re pretending to be mortals right now. So maybe stop talking about us like you’re not, hmm?”

Loman grins at her. “Fine, fine. Me and the bird will behave.” He holds out his little finger. “Pinkie-promise?”

She stares at him for a long moment before nodding and solemnly linking the offered digit with her own. Of all the peculiar things Cam has witnessed over the last few days, this is right up there at the top of his list.

“Do—did you want to go and see some things?” Brynn hangs by Cam’s side, holding themself a little awkwardly. They give Cam a cautiously hopeful smile, not quite making eye contact. “I don’t like doing everything on my own.”

Cam considers the implications of leaving Loki, Huginn, and Alice alone, then nods. It’s not like he has any control over anything, anyway. It might be easier if he’s well-removed from the chaos when it inevitably kicks off. “Sure.”

The other kid’s expression brightens, and they lead the way over to one of the displays. “I like this place,” Brynn says after a moment. “I like computers and games. Can you imagine what it was like before the internet?” They stare intently at a computer screen the size of Cam’s phone. “Can you imagine life without computers at all? That’s a strange thought.”

“Do you ever wonder what the future will be like?”

Brynn adjusts their glasses, which immediately slide back down their thin nose again, and makes a thoughtful noise. “Sometimes. I don’t think it’ll be like the movies. No flying cars. I think there’ll be fewer, um, boundaries between people and tech. Maybe. That’d be cool.”

“Like virtual reality?”

“Mmm. Not quite. Like, augmentations. Being connected to the internet in your mind. And...” Brynn hesitates and gives Cam a very quick glance before turning back to the display. “Other stuff. Disabilities and things like that being less of an issue, people accepting... I don’t know,” they finish with a shrug. “I’m bad at explaining stuff out loud.”

“I think that’d be good,” Cam says quietly. “Try and fix some of the bits of my brain that don’t feel like they work right.”

Brynn gives a nervous giggle. “Like patches for software.”

“Exactly!” Cam nods enthusiastically, warming to his subject. “Like, ‘your brain doesn’t seem to function well in this situation, so we’ve fixed it for you—try this update.’”

His new friend grins. “Seventy-eight percent of users reported an improvement in brain functionality afterwards.”

“If you two dorks have finished bonding,” Alice says, materialising next to Cam in a way that makes him think she’s been taking lessons from Huginn when he wasn’t watching, “we’re all going to watch a movie.”

“We are?”

She sighs and shakes her head. “Duh. Did you completely zone out every time Mr Barker talked about the trip?”

Cam wrinkles his nose at her, and Brynn giggles again. “Maybe,” he admits.

“We’re going to watch some dinosaur documentary or something. Come on, if you move, we might get decent seats in the IMAX.”

––––––––

IT TURNS OUT THE IMAX is vast, and there are only three school trips booked to see Walking with Dinosaurs. To Cam’s relief, Danny and the football bros camp out on the very front row, which means he, Alice, and the rest of their small group can sit quietly a few rows back. The seating is steeply sloped and Mrs Whitlow takes an aisle seat next to Brynn, who’s looking more anxious than before.

“You okay?” Cam asks as he hesitates by the empty seat on the other side of Brynn.

“Vertigo,” Brynn explains. “I don’t like heights.”

“We can sit closer to the front if you like,” Cam offers, although sitting further down the slope comes with its own risks. He can imagine only too well what it must be like to be Brynn in a class with Danny. Cam spends so much of his time at school pretending nobody else exists, he’s managed to ignore someone who could be a friend. Maybe even someone he could do things with outside of school. And if it wasn’t for Loman, he might never have spoken with Brynn at all. He’s not even sure who else Brynn hangs out with—if they spend time with anyone, that is.

The mousy-haired kid shakes their head and shrugs, looking a little pale and nervous, but grateful for the concern. “I’ll be okay, thanks. D’you want to sit next to me, though?”

In response, Cam promptly parks himself in the seat next to Brynn before his mind has a chance to second-guess the options. He can hear Danny shouting something obscene at one of his mates before Mr Barker clamps down on it. Alice settles in the chair to his right, with Loman and Huginn on the far side of her. The lights dim, the audience’s noise dies away, and the film begins.

They’re about half an hour in, Cam utterly hooked on the experience, when Danny’s voice comes to him loud and mocking from three rows below.

“This is a load of—”

“Oh, I am so bored of you, you tiny, petty, insignificant mortal,” Loman mutters. He leans forward, catches Cam’s eye in the gloom, and clicks his fingers with a sharp snap.

Cam shoots a worried glance at the front row, half-expecting to see Danny vanish, but no, the boy’s still there, lounging in his seat with long legs stretched before him.

And then the first dinosaur steps off the screen a couple of metres from Danny’s feet. It makes a rattling growl and hiss of displeasure, then turns its attention to the row of children before it. Claws scrape on the floor and Danny screams. All five boys do, in fact, and Danny’s barely scrambled to his feet before a second beast lumbers to join the first. Jack, for all his size, has joined Danny in frightened wails of alarm.

Heart racing, Cam can’t tear his eyes off the sight before him. While he’s mostly sure the two dinosaurs are probably herbivores, there’s certainly enough scales and spikes and claws that he wouldn’t want to get close.

Beside him, Alice is in gales of laughter. “Oh!” she wheezes, trying to catch her breath as Danny and his friends begin to clamber up the seating behind them in a frantic attempt to flee. “Oh, that’s just the best!”

An ear-splitting screech from above heralds the arrival of a pteranodon. Its vast wings brush against the high ceiling as it circles over the assembled children, and it shrieks out another rasping call. Its beak is huge and pointed, and whilst Cam can’t see the teeth inside, he knows they all point the wrong way, and it’s terrifying. Danny lets out another petrified shout and tries to scramble under one of the cinema seats, to no avail.

Cam looks around and realises nobody else can see the off-screen dinosaurs outside of their little group. Alice is cackling with glee, Huginn’s expression is one of outright disapproval, and Brynn looks worried but surprisingly calm. It’s only been a handful of seconds, but Mr Barker has realised something is wrong and is descending the steep steps to the front row as fast as he can, apparently heedless of the two three-metre-tall lizards swishing their tails angrily. One of the dinosaurs hisses again, and Cam’s less convinced it only eats plants, looking at those teeth.

Danny and the other four boys are swearing and crying and begging for help, and all around them people are beginning to laugh.

“It’s in 3D, idiot,” Amy-Lou says scornfully.

“It’s real!” Danny screams at her, pointing with a shaking hand at the dinosaurs. “Can’t you see them?”

She shakes her head in disbelief, turning to the girl next to her and laughing.

Mr Barker has reached the chaos of the front row. Oblivious to the dinosaurs towering over him, he yells something at the five boys about making a scene and being ridiculous.

One of the dinosaurs opens its mouth over Mr Barker’s head. Saliva drools out. The teeth are as long as Cam’s fingers.

“It isn’t real, is it?” Cam asks across Alice to where Loman is cackling with unrestrained glee.

“No,” the god gasps, tears streaming down his cheeks. “No, it’s not real, Cam.” He snaps his fingers and all three of the creatures vanish. “Even I can’t bring back the dinosaurs. Probably.”

Cam’s mind briefly whirrs through the possibility that he could—would that even be possible? He wouldn’t dare to try.

“That,” Alice says, fighting for breath between gales of delighted laughter, “was the best thing I’ve seen in years.”

On the other side of him, Brynn is giggling quietly and shyly glancing at Loman in awe. Cam wonders how much his new friend has figured out; they don’t seem all that phased by what’s just happened.

Cam collapses back into his seat and waits for his pulse to slow enough for him to think about something else other than its thundering beat. Then he remembers Danny’s glorious panic, and a small smile creeps onto his face. The last time Loman got involved with things, there was the shuriken and a conversation with Mrs Jenkins. This time, nobody got hurt.

“It was pretty good, wasn’t it?” he admits.

Loman beams. “You’re welcome,” he says, with a grand wave encompassing the picture of chaos below as Mr Barker and two other members of staff desperately try to coax Danny, Jack, and their friends back into their seats, the film paused mid-scene. “I said we could make things better, didn’t I?”

Chapter 26

The weekend passes in a blur of homework, and a sort of weird normality is almost resumed, as if the world is holding its breath and waiting to see what happens next. Mum and Frankie are being gentle and careful around Cam, in case he might break like glass at any point, but they don’t mention skipping school or night-time escapades. Loman stops by on Saturday afternoon—no ravens in sight—and tries to persuade Cam to summon an Xbox.

“One, I have nothing to play it on,” Cam points out. “Two, I think Mum and Frankie might notice, and then they would definitely have questions. And three, I’m pretty sure it would be stealing.”

Loman sulks. “You’re no fun,” he complains. “I could just make one happen, if you wanted. Or I could convince someone in a shop to give you one, if you like.”

Tempting though it might be, Cam refuses. He nearly suggests Loman comes in and hangs out for a bit, but there’s something about the memory of the other boy’s gleeful delight at the dinosaurs which keeps hold of the invitation.

“See you Monday?” he says instead.

Loman grins and leaps over the front gate, landing expertly on the path. “Of course,” he says as he saunters away. “We’ve got a school to improve, after all.”

––––––––

COME MONDAY, ALICE is still laughing every time she looks at Danny or any of his friends, and she’s not alone. The rumour mill has worked its magic, and now nearly the whole of Highgrove Secondary knows about the year sevens who were so afraid of the 3D dinosaurs they begged to be allowed to go home for the rest of the trip. It’s a blissfully chill day, and Cam even throws caution to the wind and tries his best in a science test. For once, he doesn’t care if he’s average or not, and the relief is strangely freeing. He wonders, as he hands in his paper, what it would be like to live like this every day, without worrying what anyone else thinks of him.

Danny is mysteriously absent on Tuesday—Cam doesn’t even question where he’s gone, he’s simply grateful for the other boy’s absence by the time they come round to P.E.. The rest of that group give him space to get changed without any pushes, shoves, or whispered comments, and he jogs out onto the field in the late autumn sunshine feeling as if he could fly. Although he’s tried flying, and it didn’t go so well, so maybe not the best idea, he concedes as he tries to zone back into what Mr Hall is saying.

“—we’ll only be taking the top three boys and girls from each year,” the teacher explains. “So, try your best.”

“Top three at what?” Cam whispers to Loman. Alice is—inevitably—back in Mrs Winters’ office, following the previous P.E. session and the incident with Amy-Lou’s fingers. Brynn is nowhere to be seen, and Cam’s mind strays to how awkward they must feel about being included with the girls. Then, he realises Loman has answered his question and drags his thoughts back to the boy beside him.

“Sorry, what?”

“You really don’t listen to anyone, do you?” The blonde boy grins. “Cross-country. I’ll be by the fence if you want to join me,” he adds. “Catch me running if there’s nobody chasing me—good luck with that!”

A weird, fizzing sensation tingles inside Cam, and he gazes across the empty field, trying to place it. Then it dawns on him. For the first time since primary school, he wants to be noticed at this, at what he excels at. He doesn’t want to be in the middle of the pack, boringly average, flying beneath the radar. His feet and legs are aching to run. His whole body craves it.

Loman’s expression turns wolfish. “Go on, Cam,” he murmurs, as the crowd of children line up in a huddle at the starting line on the track. “Kick their arses.”

––––––––

BY THE SECOND LAP OF the course, Cam’s settled comfortably into his stride. It’s a glorious October day: the sky is a crisp, clear blue, and leaves are scattered across the edges of the field like autumnal confetti as his trainers pound past them in a steady rhythm. He passes Loman, who’s lounging against the back fence, and the other boy gives him a thumbs-up and a cheerful beam of a sunshine smile. A huge black bird is perched on the top of the fence, and she spreads her wings and ruffles her feathers.

Cam grins.

“You’re doing great, Cam!” Mr Hall shouts as he finishes his third pass. “Keep going!”

Cam could keep going forever, he thinks, as he considers the four children in front of him. Two of them are good long-distance runners; the other two have outpaced themselves and are starting to flag. One of them is Jack, who’s wheezing like a winded rhino, the other is Josh. The gap between them and the leading pair is widening. India Grayson is far in the lead, but she runs for the county in the under-13s.

Fourth place would get him onto the school team. People would notice him.

Is that such a bad thing, now, though?

There’s half a lap to go, and Cam makes up his mind in a flurry of uncharacteristic determination. He gathers speed, breezes past Jack and Josh—who’re too out of breath to say anything—and now his legs feel like they’re working. This time, though, there isn’t the anxiety and nerves there had been when he was trying to keep pace with Huginn. There’s only the sheer delight of the race, of letting his body do what it’s good at, and the elation pushes him past Zach and into a comfortable second place for the final hundred metre sprint.

He’s the first boy to finish. He’s not far ahead of Zach, either, a lanky boy who normally wears glasses. Zach drifts to a breezy halt, stretches, and gives Cam an approving nod. “I remember you at Barton Hall,” he says, sounding a little out of breath. “You used to beat us in year five and six. Nice work.”

India, who came in first, wanders over. “Thought you had me for a moment, there,” she says. “You’re fast in the finish.”

Cam shyly grins and nods, mutters thanks and says how well they’ve both done, too. Mr Hall is giving him a satisfied look, as if he’s known all along what Cam was capable of. Jack is nowhere to be seen until almost the end of the lesson, when he limps into sight, mud covering the whole of his left side. He shoots Cam a baleful glare which lacks the potency it’s had previously.

“What happened to you?” someone asks, as Jack draws nearer.

“Threatened by a T-Rex?” Zach suggests, and a snicker of laughter runs through the group.

“Wow, you stink,” someone else comments, and the laughter turns into howls and cackles.

Jack snarls something about a hidden branch on the grass at the back of the field and how he tripped on it, but nobody’s paying attention by that point. Josh made it into fourth place by a gasping whisker ahead of Lucas, and the whole class is abuzz with knowing who’s going to be representing their year group at the school meet.

Loman saunters over to Cam. “Some people really should look where they’re going,” he observes, casting shade at Jack who’s angrily brushing at the foul mud covering his P.E. kit. “Those branches can come out of nowhere.”

Cam snorts. “That was you?”

“Oh, come on—he deserved it. You know he did. Josh isn’t so bad, but Jack’s another Danny. Even I can see that. Needed taking down a peg or two.” Loman laughs. “I’m pretty sure something uses that bit of the field as its toilet,” he adds. “Shame Jack happened to fall exactly there.”

This time, Cam giggles. “You’re awful,” he gasps, once he’s caught his breath again.

Loman bows. “Guilty as charged,” he admits. “But I’m awfully fun, too.”

––––––––

ALICE IS GIDDY WITH excitement at the end of the day. She flings her arms around Cam—who’s still damp from the changing room shower—and beams at him delightedly. “I saw!” she yells, before he has a chance to open his mouth. “I watched the whole thing—don’t worry, I had my meeting with Mrs Winters and she decided we should come out and spectate. You were amazing!”

The blush starts somewhere around the bottom of his ribs and floods upwards until he’s sure his ears will spontaneously combust, but Alice is bouncing on the spot.

“Wait ‘til you tell your mum! She’s gonna be so proud of you. And Frankie! Did Loman trip Jack? That was hilarious, you should’ve seen the way he just, like, face-planted into the mud. It was glorious...”

Cam lets Alice chatter on, letting her pride and happiness wash over him like the sunshine’s warmth. They meander homewards, stopping at the canal for half an hour before they swing by the corner shop for chocolate. Munching happily, Cam crosses the main road with Alice and they stroll through the estate, talking about all the things that’re going to change. A huge weight has been lifted from his shoulders, and he’s not sure how much of that is down to Loman and how much of it is his own doing. Either way, he’s pathetically grateful for it. School might not be an absolute disaster now.

They halt at the junction of her cul-de-sac, Alice chewing on the ends of her hair and turning her lips faintly purple. “You should go home,” she says, after a moment of silent nibbling.

Cam frowns and follows her unsettled gaze to the dirty silver car parked on the driveway at the end of the road. Some of his cheerfulness fades. “Whose car is that?”

“My dad’s.” She shrugs, and a resigned mask replaces the lively expressiveness he’s used to seeing. It reminds him of how she looks when a teacher’s talking at her. “Go on, Cam; I’ll see you tomorrow. Well done for kicking mahoosive butt today; you’re awesome.”

Giving one last, uncertain glance at the unfamiliar vehicle, Cam nods reluctantly. “Okay.” He pauses, then gives her a quick hug. “Message me if you need anything.”

Alice’s answering smile is fleeting, her attention already elsewhere. “Sure.”

Chapter 27

Alice isn’t waiting at the railway bridge the next morning, and Cam hangs around for as long as he dares before conceding defeat and running the mile to school. It’s not a bad pace, he reflects, as he arrives two minutes after the bell, which means a few seconds under seven minutes from the bridge. He sidles into the back of the classroom, grateful for the door’s location compared to Mr Barker’s desk, and slinks into an empty chair next to Brynn. However, Mr Barker isn’t remotely interested as he’s too busy berating Danny for some unknown misdemeanour.

“You ran?” Brynn murmurs, as Cam strips off his coat and pretends to have been sat there for at least three minutes. “You must be exhausted. But I heard how you did in P.E. yesterday—how do you even do that without dying? I get a stitch every time I try, then I get yelled at for walking when my legs feel like noodles.”

“It’s not far from the bridge,” Cam whispers back. “Not for me, anyway. And I didn’t want to come without Alice.”

Brynn frowns. “Maybe she’s sick?”

“Maybe.” Cam can’t remember the last day Alice had off sick. She’s come in looking like a walking corpse before, and she spent most of a day in the toilets after eating something she shouldn’t have. She’d have to be dead to take a day off sick.

“We can go find her, if you like? I bet Loman and Ginny would come, too. I can tell Mrs Whitlow I’m not feeling well...”

Cam shakes his head and takes his phone out of his bag under the desk as quietly as humanly possible. He messages Alice for the third time—the first two had been while he was waiting at the bridge—and puts his phone away before Mr Barker has a chance to confiscate it until lunch.

“I’m sure she’s okay,” he says, partly to reassure himself. “I bet she overslept.”

“Hmm. Probably.” Brynn doesn’t sound convinced, but they nod and go back to the book they’re reading, giving Cam time to consider things before first period starts.

If Alice was here, she’d be telling him not to think so much, but she’s not, so he zones out into his own headspace while Mr Barker goes through the motions of the register. He just about remembers to answer his name but is too busy thinking about where Alice might be to manage much else. It’s only when Brynn taps him on the shoulder that he realises the whole class is getting to their feet and a crowd of rowdy year nine students are lined up at their form room door, ready for Geography with Mr Barker.

“Maths?” Brynn prompts.

“Oh. Yeah.” Cam hauls his attention back to the present and follows Brynn from the classroom, ducking to one side to avoid the older pupils as they jostle and shove their way into the room. Loman and Huginn are waiting, leaning against the wall of the library opposite. Cam doesn’t even question where Huginn has acquired a school uniform from—it’s the least of his concerns.

“Are the angles going to add up properly today?” Cam asks, and Loman laughs.

“Who knows?” he says, with a casual shrug. “Very unpredictable things, triangles.”

––––––––

THE TRIANGLES BEHAVE as expected, and Cam sits next to Brynn again. It’s nice to work through problems with someone else, and his new friend seems equally happy to have someone to talk to. For most of the lesson, though, Cam’s mind is only half on the subject matter, and Brynn keeps quietly correcting his mistakes.

“You’re worried about Alice, aren’t you?” they ask, after pointing out that twenty-three and fifty-seven don’t make ninety.

Cam gives a miserable nod and fixes his error. Checking to see where Mrs Walker’s attention is, he sneaks a glance at his phone. No response to any of his messages. The little ticks have stayed stubbornly grey; Alice hasn’t even seen his messages yet.

Maybe she is asleep.

He fervently hopes she is, because if not, he can’t think of any other reason why she wouldn’t respond—at least, no explanations which don’t make his heartbeat flutter rapidly in panic. With an effort of will, he stops his thoughts from spiralling into anxious worries and attempts to focus on the angular problems on the page in front of him. They seem insignificant and pointless.

“How long have you and Alice been friends?” Brynn asks out of the blue.

Cam pauses in his attempts to draw a triangle and fiddles with the protractor instead. “Um.” Alice has been a part of his life since forever. “Always.” He remembers running around in the small garden with her, chasing bubbles which Frankie kept moving out of their reach. Alice coming for sleepovers and dinner, and asking endless questions about magic. He doesn’t even remember when she first found out about the magic, either—that must have been when they were very small. He tries to imagine a life without his best friend and feels slightly sick at the thought. Alice is the one who makes school bearable. Even now, with things improving, he still needs her.

But maybe she needs him more.

Cam twists in his chair to where Loman and Huginn are sat behind him and leans back to whisper, “Can you get us out of here again?”

Loman’s eyebrows go up and he glances towards the teacher, who has her back turned to them. “Really? Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know. To find Alice.” He gives the other boy a helpless look, and Loman sighs.

“You think she might be in trouble?”

Cam nods.

“Let us go, then,” Huginn offers, before Loman can say anything else. “You should stay in school.” She glares at the boy next to her, as if daring him to contradict her.

“Cam and Loman,” Mrs Walker’s voice cuts in sharply. “I’m sure it’s a fascinating conversation, but it can wait until after this lesson.”

Slamming his chair’s feet back on the floor, Cam stares at his exercise book, his face burning with shame. He can barely see the questions on the page before him.

Huginn’s hand brushes against his shoulder, and he looks up to see her black eyes staring down at him. “Stay here,” she says. “We’ll go.”

Behind her, Loman grins and gives him a thumbs-up gesture.

Mrs Walker and the rest of the class are oblivious to the pair as they hurry from the room. Cam risks a glance back to their empty seats and, to his surprise, sees two figures hunched diligently over their work, one with golden blonde curls and the other with a mass of black hair. If he concentrates, the figures seem to blur and shift, never quite dropping into focus fully. It’s a little unsettling, but the moment his attention is elsewhere, he knows Loman and Ginny are working hard and silently on their maths problems.

“Huh,” he says, nudging Brynn. “Can you see that?” He gestures behind them, and his friend turns, then adjusts their glasses.

“That’s...” Brynn frowns, the glasses immediately slipping back to the tip of their pointed nose. “This is more of what happened at the museum, isn’t it?” they whisper.

Cam nods.

Brynn gives a shy smile. “Can you tell me more about it? Maybe later?”

Cam realises he’d quite like that. “Sure.” Knowing Loki and Huginn are on the case for Alice, he finds himself able to concentrate a little more on his work. If anyone can find his best friend, those two surely can.

Chapter 28

After an anxious dinner, where he picks at his food and tries not to make Mum and Frankie worry, the doorbell rings. Cam opens the front door to find Loman and Huginn on the step, their expressions grim. His heart sinks. He pauses for a moment, then waves a hand inside.

“Who is it?” Mum calls from the living room.

“Friends from school,” he replies. It’s not exactly a lie, he thinks. He is friends with both of them, now, after everything else which has happened, and he did technically meet both of them at school.

“It’s a bit late for that,” Frankie comments, descending the stairs, her damp curls restrained by a bright yellow towel. “What’s going on?”

“We can’t find Alice,” Loman says, giving Cam a meaningful look. “We tried, but... we don’t know where she is.”

Cam’s gut threatens to return his dinner, and he holds onto the wall for support. “She’s still missing?” His mind is immediately filled with options, none of which are good, and he doesn’t know where to think first. The possibilities spiral into a whirlwind of panic. Frankie puts a hand on his shoulder, her presence pulling him back into focus.

“We’ll find her,” his aunt says. “I promise.” She turns to Loman and Huginn, giving them both a contemplative once-over. “I see,” she adds, nodding. “I thought as much. Come on, you’d better come through. Rowan will need to hear this as well.”

Cam follows Loman and Huginn into the living room, where Mum is curled on the sofa with Dorian on her lap. Her glasses are on the coffee table and she looks more tired than usual. Huginn, in her girl-form, perches on the arm of the sofa. Loman sits cross-legged on the rug, leaving Cam with an armchair as Frankie takes the other end of the settee.

“So,” says Frankie, conversationally. “Let’s start with the Norse god and the raven sitting in our front room, and we’ll go from there.”

Cam shoots Loman and Huginn a terrified look, then back to Frankie and Mum. The latter looks bewildered; his aunt looks satisfied. “Did I get it right?” she asks.

Huginn nods, stretching her arms above her head. Shadows of wings flicker across the wallpaper behind her. “How did you know?”

“I pieced it together,” Frankie says, waving a hand. The towel around her head begins to dry her hair of its own accord. “Finding black feathers in Cam’s room was a bit of a clue. But this one...” She puts her head to one side, considering Loman. “He’s harder to read.”

“Loki Laufeyjarson at your service,” Loman intones, bowing as effectively as he can whilst sat on the floor.

“The trickster?” Frankie frowns, then turns her gaze to Cam. “And I take it this was what you were trying to figure out? How long have you known?”

Heat rises in Cam’s cheeks at his aunt’s unwavering stare. “I... uh...”

“Not long,” Loman says. “He’s been surprisingly dense. But that’s not the point. Cam has nothing to do with Alice’s disappearance, and neither do I.”

Cam’s guilt at summoning Loki is swept aside by the rushing torrent of fear for his best friend, which surges back in a tsunami. If something’s happened to Alice, if she needed him and he wasn’t there...

“She’ll be okay,” Mum says softly. She’s been quiet this whole time, listening to their conversation and stroking Dorian. The cat’s purrs rumble gently at the edge of Cam’s hearing, familiar and comforting. “We’ll find her. What do we know?”

“She wasn’t at school today,” Cam mumbles. “She...” He stares at the carpet. He’s been so dim. “Her dad’s car was at her house yesterday.”

“I thought you didn’t go to her house?” Frankie asks. She leans forward, wrists resting on her knees, the towel and her wet hair forgotten.

“I don’t,” he says. “Not often, anyway. Like, a few times. And I didn’t even go in, just stopped at the end of her road. But yesterday was... yesterday was weird. And she seemed worried.” He looks up and meets Frankie’s steady gaze, then wishes he hadn’t. The sympathy and understanding there bring hot tears pricking at his eyes. His throat is tight and it’s hard to speak. “What if something’s happened?”

“Then we’ll find her,” Mum repeats. “I suggest we start at her house. Where else might she be?”

Cam’s brain is a fog of panic. “Um...” He tries to think of places Alice might go if she didn’t come here. “The canal bridge. The graveyard, maybe. The playground, at the top of the hill.” If she’s run away, if she’s gone somewhere out of the town, or somewhere he can’t think of, he might never see her again. That idea sends a chill shiver crawling through him. What if her dad has taken her away?

“I’ll drive,” Frankie says. She turns to Loman. “I take it you can’t find her by... other means?”

Loman shakes his head. “Not in this form. It would be hard enough anyway, but...” He gestures at himself. “Being twelve again isn’t exactly a thrill.”

“I’ll ask around,” Mum says. “Maybe the shadows know something. If I hear anything, I’ll call you.”

Nodding, Cam checks his phone. No messages from Alice, but the ring tone is switched on, and he has signal. There’re no missed calls or replies to his messages from earlier, and his messages remain unread. He optimistically tries ringing her, but it goes straight to voicemail.

Loman frowns. “Have you tried summoning her?”

Cam briefly considers this as an option, then shakes his head. “What if... what if it went wrong somehow? What if it wasn’t Alice? What if—”

Loman holds his hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay, I get it. We’ll try this your way, first.”

“We should go,” Frankie says. She twists her partially-dried hair into a chaotic bun, shoves a hat over the whole mess, and brandishes the keys to the Beetle. “I take it you’re all coming?”

Huginn looks at her with scepticism. “In a car?”

“You can fly if you’d prefer,” Cam says hurriedly. “I’m sure you can keep up.”

The girl shrugs. “I’ll come with you. Someone’s got to keep an eye on you, Wordsmith.”

Cam doesn’t say it out loud, but he feels marginally more reassured knowing he’ll have both Huginn and Loki with him. He doubts there’s much in the mortal world which could stand up to their combined power, so if they do run into trouble, it seems likely they can handle it.

“I’ll stay here, if I’m going to speak with the shadows,” says Mum. She stands, pouring Dorian off her lap. The cat grumbles before going to flop in his bed by the fireplace. “Don’t worry,” she adds, noticing Cam’s apprehensive expression. “I’ll be safe. I never stay long in the shadows, I promise.” She gives him a quick hug. “We’ll find Alice, I’m sure of it.”

Frankie opens the front door, and Cam follows Loman and Huginn out into the evening. It’s cold and damp, fog hanging in the air like a shroud, and the world is transformed into a place of mystery and secrets. Familiar shapes loom dark and forbidding from the greyness. Cam instinctively steps closer to his friends.

“Well, this bodes,” Frankie notes as she unlocks the car and ushers the three of them inside. Loman and Huginn take the back seat, Cam slides into the passenger seat beside his aunt.

“Bodes good or ill?” Huginn asks.

Frankie shrugs. “Let’s hope for good,” she replies. “Now, do up your seatbelts, you two.”

Loman stares at her, then obliges. “You know it probably wouldn’t make any difference if I went through the windscreen,” he says, clicking the belt into place.

“And yet, I’m still not driving anywhere until all of you are buckled in,” she grins. “Immortals or not, you abide by the rules of the Beetle.”

Despite his raw nerves aching at Alice’s predicament, Cam giggles to himself as he puts on his belt. Only Frankie would dare talk to Loki and Huginn like that. The amusement soon fades, however, and he’s left staring out of the window as the foggy world speeds past on the way to Alice’s house. One thought circles round and round endlessly.

What if they’re too late?

Chapter 29

Alice’s house is a rundown semi-detached on an elderly estate. None of the buildings are in particularly bad shape, but the cars are all old, and the whole place has an aura of neglect and weary apathy. Her home is tucked into a small group of six buildings on a cul-de-sac, and Frankie lurches to a halt in front of it on the path. A streetlight casts its sullen glow over them, the light only making the shapes hidden in the fog more unsettling.

“I think you should stay here,” Frankie says, switching off the engine. “If there’s a risk anything’s happened to Alice, I don’t want you – any of you – involved. Cam, be ready to call the police.”

Those words send another ripple of anxious nausea through him, but he nods and fishes his phone out from his hoodie pocket. His messages to Alice are still unread.

“I’ll come with you,” Huginn announces. “I’ll check through the upstairs windows, just in case,” she adds, when Frankie looks unconvinced.

“How—oh.” Frankie nods. “Fine. Cam, Loki, you stay here.” She gets out, moves the seat to let Huginn extract herself from the back of the car, and pauses while the girl shifts into a pool of inky darkness which takes off into the fog like a winged shadow.

With the mist swallowing Huginn, Frankie leans forward into the car. “I won’t be long,” she says. “Stay here.” Then, she slams the driver’s side door and strides towards Alice’s house.

“Is she always like that?” Loman asks. He shuffles until he’s resting his elbows on the backs of the front two seats, peering between to be closer to Cam.

Cam shrugs. “I guess so.”

“Huh.” The boy god gazes after Frankie, a thoughtful expression on his face. “Interesting.”

“Do you think Alice is in there?” Cam shuffles in his seat to try and get a better view of the front door. He can just make out his aunt, but there are no lights on in the house and no car on the driveway.

“If she is, Huginn will find her,” Loman reassures him. “Trust me, if there’s anyone thinking in that house, she’ll know they’re there.”

Somewhat relieved—it hadn’t occurred to Cam that Huginn might be able to listen to people’s thoughts in that way—Cam leans back into his seat. “She’s going to be okay, isn’t she?” The words are out of his mouth before he’s even aware of thinking them.

Loman makes a non-committal noise in response. “I don’t know. Maybe? I’m not omniscient.” He chuckles. “Can you imagine how much fun that would be, though?”

Cam shudders. “I think it’d be awful,” he admits. “Knowing everything.”

The other boy’s grin widens, becoming something unsettling, and he leans back into the rear seats, folding his arms behind his head. “You’d get to know everything if you wanted it,” he muses. “Where everyone is, what they’re doing, even why they’re doing it...”

Cam nods. “That’s why I think it’d be horrible. People... people aren’t great.”

Loman shrugs. “They’re just humans. Mortals are messy creatures. They don’t get to practise things, they figure everything out as they’re going. It’s like... building a boat whilst learning how to swim in the middle of an ocean storm. And then you’re gone, and it’s someone else’s turn to panic about things for the next eighty years.”

“Mmm.” Cam frowns and turns his attention back to the house, where Frankie is banging on the front door again. The sound of her knocking comes to him faintly through the glass. Upstairs, Huginn is drifting from one shut window to the next, barely visible in the foggy night.

“She’s not here,” he mutters. He could have predicted that Theo, Alice’s older brother, wouldn’t be home—according to Alice, he rarely is these days—but Alice doesn’t have the options Theo does.

“So, where else could she be?” Loman asks, echoing Cam’s thoughts. “You know her better than anyone, right?”

“I... maybe?”

Loman beams at him. “Have some confidence, Cam. Please.”

“Okay.” Cam nods, thinking hard. “We’ll try the canal bridge next. It’s where we go sometimes after school.”

“Sounds like a good option,” Loman agrees. “And if she’s not there?”

“Then we keep looking.”

Frankie marches to the car and opens the driver’s side door. She doesn’t get in, and she’s muttering something under her breath.

“Nobody there?” Cam asks.

She shakes her head. “Nobody there. Huginn’s finishing checking, but it’s silent as a grave.”

“You need to go to more exciting graves,” Loman suggests. “They don’t have to be quiet.”

“I’d really rather they were,” she replies, as Huginn floats down and shimmers back into her human form.

“Spoilsport,” Loman grumbles, but he shuffles to one side to allow Huginn into her seat again.

Frankie slides the driver’s seat back and turns to Cam. “So... where next?”

“The canal bridge,” he says. He doesn’t say anything out loud, but the ache of disappointment at not finding Alice here must have shown, because Frankie leans over and gives him a brief hug.

“It’s okay,” she reassures him before putting on her own belt. “We’ll find her.”

“Nobody was in the house,” Huginn says as Frankie pulls the Beetle away from the kerb and heads towards the canal. “Completely empty. Is that normal?”

Cam thinks about the number of times Alice has stayed at his for dinner, or the number of times she’s made herself plain toast for tea because she’s been on her own, and nods. “Yeah. That’s normal.”

––––––––

ALICE ISN’T AT THE canal bridge, either. Cam stands, leaning against the cold railings and staring at the dark water, thinking desperately. Fog has eaten everything around him, reducing the world to a faintly orange-tinted mist of greys and blacks. It seems to be gnawing away at his thoughts as well, because all his mind can manage is an endless spiral of panic and doom, until all that’s left is a dreary haze of worries.

He doesn’t even notice the footsteps behind him until Loman is stood beside him, resting his arms on the top of the railings.

“She’s smart,” Loman says, quietly. “She’ll be all right.”

“What if she isn’t?” Cam’s voice is barely a whisper; fear tugs at each syllable. He’s so scared he’s lost his best friend, and nothing he can say or think will take away that terror.

“Trust me.” Loman gazes out across the canal. “I know she’ll be fine. We should try the playground, next,” he adds. “Where you two came and found me.”

Cam nods, because he can’t think of anything else. At least moving is better than standing still and waiting for nothing to happen.

Loman puts a hand on his shoulder and gives him a gentle push. “Let’s get back to Frankie. The quicker we’re on the road again, the sooner we’ll get to the next place.”

“If she’s not there...” Cam doesn’t want to finish his sentence.

“If she’s not, then we’ll try somewhere else,” Loman assures him. He gives Cam an optimistic smile. “We can always try and contact Muninn if we need to. She’ll be able to track down our wayward Valkyrie, if anyone can.”

“Okay.” The uncertainty in the single word is audible, and it hangs in the air like a bad smell.

Loman’s smile shifts to a grin. “Those two could find a shadow at midnight under a new moon,” he says. “I have faith in our feathered friends. Come on, Cam.”

Reluctantly, Cam follows Loman away from the water’s edge and along the narrow path to where Frankie’s parked. She gives him an understanding look as they approach without Alice in tow and nods as she opens the passenger door.

“The old playground?” she says. She doesn’t ask if they had any luck at the canal, and Cam is grateful.

“Yeah.”

Cam watches the night-time world slide past his window, keeping half an ear open to Huginn and Loman’s conversation in the back seat, and wonders what Alice is thinking about right now. Is she safe? Is she frightened? He can’t imagine Alice being afraid of anything, but it’s all her can think about at this moment in time.

He wants to throw up.

By the time they reach the gates to the park, it’s taking every ounce of self-control he has to keep his dinner in his stomach. The second Frankie turns off the engine, he gets out of the car and breathes a deep lungful of the cold, damp air. Everything is quiet; it’s as if the fog has consumed all sounds and movement, as if the whole town is holding its breath for whatever comes next.

Frankie waves an irritable hand at the locked gates, and the padlock shatters, scattering broken pieces of metal across the pavement. “That’s enough of that,” she says, slamming the driver’s door shut behind her. Huginn and Loman silently extract themselves from the back seat and get out of Cam’s side.

With a shove, Frankie opens one of the gates. Its metal hinges complain bitterly, and the rusty squeal is sharp in the silence. She marches into the foggy gloom of the park, towards the fenced-off section for the playground, and Cam slouches behind her, hands buried deep into the pockets of his hoodie, wishing he had a tenth of her confidence and determination. He can’t believe there’s anything in the world which could stop Frankie if she had her mind set on something.

She’s like Alice would have been.

He winces at that thought and immediately corrects himself. She’s like Alice will be.

But it’s too late; the damage is done. The words have been thought, and now they’re there, in his mind, and he can’t unthink them, can’t undo what he hasn’t said. They echo as if he shouted them into an infinite cave, bouncing back and forth between the walls of his skull, and he’s terrified this is the one time his magic doesn’t need to be written, that by simply thinking the wrong thing, he’s doomed his best friend.

Chapter 30

It takes all of Cam’s effort to open the low gate to the playground beyond. He glances back at Frankie for reassurance as he steps past the threshold, and she nods at him.

“If she’s there,” Frankie says, “she won’t want all four of us at once. You go ahead—I’ll be able to see you from here.”

“I’ll check the surrounding area,” Huginn offers, and in a matter of moments she’s airborne once more, ghosting upwards into the mist.

“I’ll come with you,” Loman suggests, but Cam shakes his head.

“No, thanks. I’ll be okay.” Cam swallows and looks around the familiar, shadowy shapes of the playground. To his left are the swings, to his right a seesaw, and ahead is the climbing frame and tower. A silver slide descends from the top of the tower, spiralling to the cracked rubbery surface below. There’s only one place Alice could be, if she’s here, and it’s at the top of the tower.

With anxiety vibrating through him, Cam hurries to the bottom of one of the ladders and starts climbing. He doesn’t pause to think about what he’s doing, because if he does, he might never move from the spot.

Alice sits huddled in the corner of the tower, her back pressed against the faded paint of the wooden structure, a tatty grey rucksack beside her. She’s wearing an oversized plaid jacket—it must be her brother’s, Cam reasons in an abstract way—and her long hair hangs in a damp, bedraggled mess around her shoulders.

Cam freezes, half in, half out of the small space. “Um,” he says. “Hi.”

She’s alive, she’s breathing, she’s okay, and he hasn’t lost her forever. He’s not sure if his heart’s ever thundered this fast, or if it’s actually stopped from sheer relief and he just hasn’t noticed yet.

Alice gives him an empty look. “Hi.”

“I... We came looking for you. I was worried.”

“You didn’t have to be.” She shrugs. “Stupid.”

He feels small and deflated, as if her words have poked holes in his skin and let all of his fragile self-esteem bleed out into the night. “Oh. Sorry. I... I’ll go away. Sorry.”

She grimaces and pushes hair back out of her face. A dark bruise colours one cheek, and there’s dried blood at the side of her mouth. He’s never seen her like this before. “No, wait.” There’s a hesitant hitch to the request, and Cam pauses in the act of climbing back down.

“I’m sorry.” She’s on the verge of tears. “I’m sorry, Cam. I didn’t know where to go, and my phone battery died, and they wouldn’t let me charge it, and...”

He scrambles up the last couple of steps and flings his arms around her in a tight embrace before he has the chance to second-guess himself anymore.

“Then you come to me,” he whispers. “That’s what friends are for.”

She gives a shaky giggle, which turns into a hiccupping sob, and clings onto him. “I’m sorry,” she says again, through her tears.

“It’s okay.” He holds Alice, trying very hard not to cry with relief at having found her, and leans his head against hers. “We’re all here for you.”

There’s a sharp intake of breath and she pulls away a fraction, frowning. “All?”

“Me, Frankie, Loman and Huginn,” he amends. “Mum’s at home, talking to the shadows to see if anyone can find you. When you didn’t show up at school...”

“I know. Dad wouldn’t let me out of the house, and then I couldn’t face going to school and having to explain this to Mrs Winters or Mr Barker, or you...” Alice gestures at the bruise on her cheekbone and scrubs tears from her face angrily. “I didn’t want to see anyone.”

Cam stares at her, his thoughts a complicated muddle. “Oh.”

“But I’m glad you came,” she adds in a rush. “If anyone was going to come and find me, I’m glad it was you. And the others, I’m glad they came as well.” Pausing for a long breath, Alice hugs her arms around herself, and gives Cam a long, steady look. “Can we go, now? Back to your house? Because you’re not going to take me back home, are you? Because if you are—”

“We’re not,” he reassures her. “I think, I mean, I don’t think...”

Alice gives him a weary smile. “Stop thinking, idiot.”

And there she is for real, his best friend. “Okay. No more thinking.” He gives her another stupid grin, not sure if he’s going to laugh or sob. “Come on, let’s go find the others.”

She follows him down the ladder—he briefly considers taking the slide but chickens out at the last minute—and they walk together, not quite holding hands, across the deserted playground to where Frankie is waiting with Loman by the gate in the low fence. There’s no sign of Huginn, who must still be scouting the area on silent, shadowy wings, but Frankie gives them both a relieved smile as they approach.

“Are you all right?” she asks Alice as they draw nearer.

Alice shrugs. “Yeah.”

Frankie gives her a look Cam recognises only too well. “It’s okay to not be okay,” she says. “And, in my experience, people who’re all right don’t tend to run away from home. Do you want to try that again?”

There’s a lengthy pause before whatever invisible wall Alice has built around herself begins to crumble. She manages to shake her head before the tears start to fall again, and Frankie takes a step forward, putting a gentle hand on the girl’s shoulder.

“It might not be okay now,” she says softly, “but it will be. You’re not going through any of this alone, Alice. Do you have family you’d like to go to, or would you like to come back with us?”

Alice sniffs and gives Cam a damp, worried glance.

“She’s coming with us,” he says. “There’s nowhere else for her to go. That’s okay, isn’t it? If she stays with us for a bit?”

“I don’t see why not. She can stay in the spare bedroom once we’ve cleared some of the boxes and junk out of there.” Frankie pulls Alice into an embrace and Alice leans against her. Cam’s not used to seeing his bestie like this, vulnerable and hurting, and he doesn’t know what to do. He wants to hug her and protect her, and there’s a hot spark kindled inside him he doesn’t recognise.

“May I see your face?” Frankie asks Alice, keeping her voice low and quiet.

Alice nods, and Frankie gently scoops a curtain of damp hair out of the way so she can see the bruising more clearly.

“Ouch,” Frankie says, sympathetically. “That looks very painful. I don’t think anything’s broken, though. Did you get hurt anywhere else?”

Alice’s eyes drift over to Cam, uncertain and hesitant.

“Let’s get back to the car,” Loman suggests. He nudges Cam in a way that implies he’d quite like to talk without being overheard, and Cam reluctantly nods. He doesn’t want to leave Alice, even though he knows she isn’t alone anymore.

“Now,” Loman adds. He starts walking and Cam hurries to catch up.

“You want vengeance,” the god says, as soon as they’re out of earshot of Frankie and Alice. “On the people who hurt her.”

And just like that, the spark flickering in Cam’s chest catches, and he recognises it for what Loman describes. “Yeah.”

“I can help you,” Loman offers. “But we’d need to stay away from Huginn. She gets... funny about me getting involved with mortal affairs.”

Cam swallows, glancing back over his shoulder to where Frankie is stood, talking with Alice. The mist drifts around them both, blurring their edges and turning them spectral. “I... I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

Loman flings his hands in the air in a dramatic gesture and groans. “Oh, come on, Cam. You want to make them miserable; you want revenge for how they made Alice feel – Odin’s eye, even I want that, and I’ve only known her a few days. I can’t intervene directly without Huginn clawing my brains out in retribution, but I can give you... guidance.” He gives a sly grin and lowers his voice. “I’m very good at this sort of thing, y’know. And nobody would ever know I was involved, or you were involved. It could be our secret.”

Cam shakes his head and does his best to ignore the flames of retribution burning inside him. “I just want her to be okay.”

“Fiiine.” Loman kicks at the dirt and gives Cam a grudgingly appreciative look. “You know, I never would’ve thought you’d say no to anything. I thought you’d always do whatever someone else wanted, no questions asked. I’m proud of you.”

Cam opens his mouth to respond but stays silent. He watches his feet as he slouches through the long grass and brown leaves, his trainers already soaked in the dew and fallen mist. Does he really do that? He tries to think of a time when he’s said ‘no’ to anyone and fails miserably.

“Cheer up,” Loman grins at him. “We’ve got Alice back, and she’s safe. Feathers isn’t gonna drag me back to my endless torment imminently—and I’m sure I can find a way out of that—so I think we’re all good. Back to your house, so we can eat ice-cream and watch a bad movie and for a while you can pretend everything’s normal. Isn’t that how you mortals do things?”

Sighing, Cam halts and looks back across the shaggy, autumnal field to where Frankie and Alice are slowly beginning to pick their way in his footsteps. The dark figure of Huginn materialises next to them, and the trio are paused in time for a moment, shadowy outlines in the fog.

Can anything feel like any sort of normal after the week he’s had?

Cam doesn’t think so. Normal was a long way off before Loman came into his life, and now it’s so far away he doesn’t even think he knows what it’s supposed to look like anymore.

“I can probably fix things, if you didn’t want to,” the god continues. He runs a hand through his messy hair and gives Cam an optimistic smile. “I can’t guarantee they’d turn out any better in the long run, knowing my luck, but... I think we’d have fun in the meanwhile.”

“No,” Cam says, watching Frankie giving Alice another bear hug. “No, I don’t think anything needs fixing anymore. I think we’ve just fixed it.”

Chapter 31

Alice cuddles next to Cam in the back seat of the Beetle, while Loman sits in the front, chatting away to Frankie about the truths behind different myths. Cam barely hears a word they’re saying, though. He puts his arm around Alice and holds her, and she does the same in return. For most of the journey he’s so glad to have her back that his thoughts are a jumble of relieved emotions which don’t even form proper words. She doesn’t talk, either, just leans against him with her eyes closed.

When they eventually reach home, Cam leads his best friend inside out of the cold and damp.

“Mum!” he shouts. “We found Alice!”

There’s a ruffle of feathers, and two ravens appear on the stairs. Inside, they look even bigger than Cam remembers, each bird taking up a whole step to itself, and he takes an involuntary pace backwards.

The air around one of them blurs and shimmers, and Huginn—the girl he knows—takes its place. She turns to glare at Muninn.

“You going to change or do I have to do all the talking again?”

Muninn croaks and shuffles a little awkwardly.

“Fine.” Huginn folds her arms and fixes her black eyes on Cam instead. “Muninn wants you to know she’s going to be all right.”

Cam waves a hand at Alice. “I know—we found her. You know we did. Mum!”

Huginn sighs. “Not Alice. Your mother.”

Cam’s whole body goes cold as if he’s been dropped into icy water. “What?”

Huginn glances at her sibling. “I told you it was like trying to talk to a rock,” she says, before turning back to Cam. “Your mother is... unwell. She went into the shadows and was there too long. She’s back, but...” For once, she looks young and worried, almost human.

Frankie shuts the door in silence. She locks it slowly, then hangs her coat on one of the overflowing pegs, then looks at Huginn. “Rowan wouldn’t do that,” she says quietly. “She’s too smart, she knows the risks.”

Cam can only stare at Huginn. The girl puts her head to one side. “I’m sorry, Cam. She’ll be okay.”

Muninn croaks and Huginn winces. “I mean, she should be. I’m not completely sure. There’s a chance she’s left something there, or something’s followed her back...”

“But...” Cam trails off. Everything feels numb and too hot and too cold, and he can’t focus. He swallows, tries again. “But she goes into the shadows all the time.” His heart is too far away and in his ears at the same time, and his mind keeps whirling back to snatches of what he read in Libris Sapientia.

“She’s in her bedroom?” The words are barely out of Frankie’s mouth before Huginn nods, and Frankie storms up the stairs past Huginn, who flattens herself against the bannisters. Cam sags against the wall. He can’t keep pace with everything this day has to throw at him. Next to him, Alice and Loman exchange a meaningful look as Huginn scrambles down the last few steps.

“Shadow-shifters are strong,” the raven girl reassures him. “She’ll recover from this, I’m sure. There’s no knowing exactly what’s happened. Muninn and I, we don’t see everything.”

It feels like it takes forever before Frankie descends the stairs again, this time slower and more subdued. There’s a tightness in her eyes and around her mouth which Cam doesn’t recognise, and a fear in her expression that is so unlike Frankie for a moment he doesn’t know her.

Then, there’s footsteps behind her, and Mum is there, looking fatigued and drained, almost as if something has sapped the colour and strength out of her. She gives Cam a weary smile, and he almost knocks his friends out of the way in his rush to get up the stairs and fling his arms around her.

“Gentle, please,” she murmurs, but she hugs him back nearly as tightly. “I’m going to be fine. I just need to lie down for a bit.”

“You promise?” he whispers, tears of relief and exhaustion hot in his eyes. He presses his face against her shoulder, trying his best not to cry in front of everyone. After everything with Alice, he can’t even begin to process thinking about what it would be like if he lost Mum.

She rubs his back between his shoulders, and a little of the tightness inside him eases at the touch. “I promise, sweetheart. I’m going to go to sleep and I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

“Okay.”

Muninn makes a rattling caw, and Huginn grins as Cam turns round and looks back down to where she’s standing. “And there’s something else we need to do, too, before Rowan goes to bed,” Huginn says.

“What?” He reluctantly lets go of Mum.

“Alice’s gift.”

Everyone turns to stare at Huginn, who gives Cam a bright smile in response to his wide eyes. “Oh, come on,” she says. “Muninn told me about your vision. The sooner we do this, the quicker it’ll happen, and then she can get used to it. Everyone here needs something positive, right?”

Alice, meanwhile, is staring at Cam in unusual silence. When she breaks it, her voice is barely audible. “My gift?”

“Muninn showed me Frankie writing her name in the book,” Cam explains. “But then it changed and showed you doing it as well. I think... Well, it was after I bumped my head in the graveyard, and maybe she put the vision there or something?”

Muninn’s avian features don’t so much as twitch, but Cam could swear the bird looks self-satisfied.

Alice’s confused green eyes flick to the raven on the stairs, then Frankie and Mum. “She can see things that haven’t happened yet?”

Huginn shrugs. “They just haven’t happened for you, yet.”

Frankie frowns and descends the last two steps. “But they have happened?”

“Look, we can go and see the Wayward Sisters if you want, I’m sure Muninn can help us find the way.” Huginn leans against the wall and folds her arms with a deep sigh. “Witches like your family always have strong threads, although their pattern isn’t always fully woven. Memories aren’t quite fixed in mortal minds, they’re flexible. So Alice could write her name today, or she could write it a year from now. But the chances of her doing it are extremely high...”

Only about half of what Huginn said makes any sense to Cam, but he nods and doesn’t ask questions. Wayward Sisters? Threads of what?

“I’ll get the book,” Frankie says.

Cam glances at the clock. It’s almost eleven o’clock—he hadn’t realised quite how long they’d spent looking for Alice.

“No school tomorrow,” Frankie adds, as if she’s the one who can read minds instead of Huginn. “We’ve had enough of a day that I think everyone’s earned a break.” She hurries back up the stairs, leaving the five of them alone. Six, if you count Muninn. Mum looks ready to fall asleep, but she makes her way slowly downstairs, holding onto the bannisters and taking each step one at a time.

Alice is almost vibrating with nervous tension, her fingers twisting and fiddling with one of the knotted friendship bracelets Cam had made in the summer. The threads are faded and worn, and when it breaks, he’s got a new one already made for her upstairs in his bedroom. She chews at her bruised bottom lip, and Cam takes a step closer.

“It’s okay,” he says. “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”

“What if I get it wrong?” she whispers.

“I—I don’t think you can,” he replies. “Remember, if I can do something, you definitely can.”

She elbows him half-heartedly, and he manages an echo of a smile as Frankie returns, Libris Sapientia tucked under one arm. “Come on,” she says, heading for the dining table.

“We’re doing this now?” Alice shoots Cam a worried look.

“Apparently so.” He gives her a reassuring hug, and they follow Frankie, with Mum, Loman and Huginn close behind. Muninn stays on the stairs, a silent patch of darkness watching them through the bannister rails with bright obsidian eyes.

Frankie sets Libris Sapientia on the table and produces a pen, which she hands to Alice. Alice takes it in shaking fingers and eyes the leather-bound book apprehensively.

“Are you sure?” she asks. “I mean, I thought it was just for your family...”

“You are family, now,” Frankie says, with a reassuring nod. “Open it. It’ll pick the page, like it did for Cam.”

“Okay...” Warily, Alice does as instructed, and the book falls open to the page where Cam wrote his name a little over a week ago. “My full name?”

Frankie nods. “It’s going to be okay, Alice. Whatever happens, you’ve got us now.”

Alice breathes out a long sigh, then writes her name underneath Cam’s.

ALICE CASEY HAWTHORN

She puts the pen down and looks between Frankie and Cam. Then, she shivers. “Oh!” A delighted smile brightens her tired expression, and she almost bounces on the spot. “Oh, Cam! I think I know what I can do—come outside with me? I want to test something.”

The last thing Cam feels is enthusiasm, but Alice’s sudden joy is contagious, and he finds himself nodding and walking with her through the kitchen and out of the back door into the long, narrow garden. It’s almost entirely swallowed by fog—tendrils and swathes of it curl around them as they step outside. The air is cold and damp and sucks the warmth from his skin as soon as it touches him. He wants to go back inside, somewhere cosy and comfortable and familiar.

Alice, in contrast, barely seems to notice the weather. She skips into the centre of the lawn and beams at him. “Watch this!” she instructs.

The air around her shudders in an eerily familiar way, and a huge, shaggy wolf stands where his best friend had been moments earlier. It’s long-legged and skinny, and there’s a distinct rust-orange tint to its otherwise grey fur. Green eyes gleam at him, catching light from the kitchen window. The wolf—it can’t be anything else, Cam thinks, cold terror clutching around his chest—lets out a short bark then whines, coming over to stand in front of him. He can feel the heat of its breath, could reach out and touch its coat if he wanted to.

“Alice?” he whispers.

The wolf sits on her haunches and whines again, tail wagging enthusiastically.

Then, the misty air wavers, and Alice is crouched in front of him. She grins and scrambles to her feet.

“That. Is. Awesome!” she announces.

“You—you were a wolf,” Cam manages to stutter.

Alice flexes her fingers before running them through her hair, only to get caught in a knot. “I was. You smell awful, by the way. Like panic and fear and anger.” She wriggles her fingers loose and sets about detangling the snarled strands.

Staring at his best friend, Cam manages to find a limited number of words again. “Can you turn into—I mean, you were a wolf.”

She giggles. “Yeah.”

“What about other things? Is it—can you turn into other animals, too?”

Tilting her head to one side in a mannerism weirdly similar to Huginn, Alice considers this for a moment before her spot is taken by a large, ginger cat. The Alice-cat yowls at him and rubs herself around his ankles before chirruping and turning back.

Alice grins again. “Come on, let’s go back inside.” Then, she pauses, looks at Cam as if for the first time in a long while, and hugs him. “She’s going to be okay. I’m sure. We all are.”

Hearing Alice say that brings the lump back to his throat. For a long moment, he can’t talk and settles for leaning his head on her shoulder. To his surprise, she keeps holding him.

Frankie finds them like that a minute or so later when she comes outside.

“Did you figure it out?” she asks. “Your gift?”

Alice—reluctantly—lets go of Cam and nods. “I did!” She demonstrates by turning into an owl, which is eerily reminiscent of the bird she’d been when they’d searched for Loki, and flying loops around the garden.

Despite the worried weariness in her eyes, Frankie smiles. “Oh, that’s cool!” she exclaims, watching Alice. “There’s not been a shapeshifter in the family for decades.”

Cam turns to his aunt. “Alice really is family, now?”

Frankie puts an arm around his shoulders. “Of course. Family are the people we choose to be around. They’re the ones we’d do anything to help and protect, who’d do the same for us. They’re the people we trust with anything. They don’t have to be blood-relations to be family.”

He cuddles into her warmth and comfort, his eyes on Alice. His thoughts continue to whirl like a hurricane, although they slow and calm with every breath. Things are different, changing all around him every day, but there is familiarity within the new, which makes it less terrifying.

His best friend drops to the ground, changing as she descends the last few feet, and lands in her human form on the wet grass. It’s as if she’s always been this person and now, finally, she has the freedom to be herself. Cam wonders if it’s as amazing for her as running the cross-country was for him—the opportunity to embrace his abilities without worrying what other people might think.

Is the magic always there, he wonders, simply waiting for them to write their names and unleash it?

Frankie presses a soft kiss to the top of his head and the mist-damp curls of his hair. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s get inside out of the rain—all of us. Tomorrow, we can start to figure out what happens next.”

Acknowledgements

I’m thrilled to be able to introduce Cam and my ‘chaos kids’ to you all, and I have so many people to thank for helping my strange story to get this far. Firstly, my parents, for supporting their weird child who spent most of her teenage years shut in her bedroom with a laptop, writing truly awful stories. Without their encouragement, I would never have made it. My wonderful and supportive Derek, for understanding that sometimes I live in a world he can’t see, and for all the hours of conversations about people who exist only in my mind. Fred and Andy, thank you for your boundless enthusiasm for this story and tolerance for hearing ‘first draft scruff’ chapters, and the rest of the York Shed Appreciation Society for all their amazing feedback over the years. Huge thank you to my early beta readers: Amelia, Evie, Fraser, India, and Thomas—you’re all awesome, and this book is here because you believed in it. The online crew: Sammi, Taylor, and Seb. Your cheerleading has kept me going when nothing else did. And thank you to the brilliant team at Shadow Spark Publishing, including Jess and Mandy for taking a chance on their first middle grade novel, Kaitlin and Susan for your editing expertise, and everyone else for welcoming me into the fold! There would be a lot more errors in here without your input. Any mistakes remaining are mine alone; the ones that aren’t here are due to the incredible people who’ve helped along the way.

About the Author

Rosalind Dando is a fantasy writer, living in the north of England and pretending not to have a Southern accent. She's been writing since she could hold a pencil and enjoys exploring her favourite tropes of found family and reluctant protagonists. When not teaching, she can be found at home with a multitude of hobbies, because her life clearly isn't busy enough without extra challenges.

She can be found on Twitter at @ortyallin or on Facebook as Rosalind Dando Author.